Beneath surface, Americans ambivalent about diversity
JONATHAN TILOVE
Newhouse News Service
Diversity is strength.
That sentiment has emerged in recent years as an article of faith in American public life.
But research suggests that faith in diversity is being sorely tested. New studies confirm earlier evidence that, at least in the short- to mid-term, diversity weakens civic ties, fostering mutual mistrust and detachment. Beneath all the “happy talk” about diversity, many Americans harbor a deep ambivalence about where it will lead.
“Most everybody says, ‘Yes, I’m in favor of diversity and I really like multiculturalism,’ but if there’s nothing to pull people together they get kind of nervous. And they really can’t articulate where to draw the line,” said Joseph Gerteis, a sociologist with the University of Minnesota’s American Mosaic Project, which is probing how Americans think about questions of diversity and solidarity.
The Mosaic work is complemented by a massive national study by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, who reports that in the face of large-scale immigration, many Americans are overwhelmed by diversity. Putnam calls it “socio-psychological system overload.” With stunning regularity, he found Americans in more diverse locales tending to “hunker down and pull in like a turtle,” suspicious not just of the new or different, but of everybody. “They don’t trust their neighbors or shop clerks, they are not as involved in the community,” Putnam said. “The only two things that go up as diversity rises are protest marches and TV watching.”