Here in New York City, we have ethnic communities, ethnic food, ethnic festivals, ethnic cultural centers, ethnic heritage events, etc., for virtually every ethnicity under the sun. I enjoy and benefit from this kind of diversity. Just this past Saturday, for instance, I went to an Indonesian block food/culture festival in one of my favorite NYC neighborhoods called Elmhurst, Queens, the single most diverse zip code in the United States, where, among other things, you can get some of the best authentic food in the city at great prices. And then, after that, I met some friends in the German/Austrian museum called the Neue Galerie to see some pre-World War II German art. I love NYC in large part BECAUSE of this kind of diversity, because of these infinite cultural opportunities. I wouldn’t want to live in a homogeneous environment. I would it find it stultifying.
But I want to stress the importance of finding a middle ground between the total erasure of ethnic identity, on the one hand, and total immersion in the ethnic experience on the other hand. As a Russian immigrant to the U.S., I am in touch with other Russian people, many of whom live in certain areas of Brooklyn. And I socialize with them. A few of them are, like me, people who move freely between English-speaking and Russian-speaking environs and who have friends and acquaintances from many communities and of many ethnicities. But many others stay completely immersed in their Russian-speaking enclave. They live there, they work there, and they socialize there. They listen to Russian radio and watch Russian t.v. They barely speak English. They are barely American. I live in one of the cities many Chinatowns (in the most well-known one in Manhattan). Here, as well, I see Chinese people who are tied to their culture but still integrated into our larger culture and others who barely speak a word of English and hang out all the time with other similar immigrants (mostly from the Fujian province). Almost without exception, the immigrants who are more integrated are more educated, and, in most tangible and intangible respects, more successful. This is a chicken-and-egg issue, in that it is not clear what led to what, but I believe it’s really a vicious or virtuous circle, a feedback loop.
The same thing that is true of these foreign-born immigrants is true of American-born blacks, so far as I can tell (and as the data I adduced in my earlier post showed). The ones who live their lives overly connected to all-black neighborhoods generally tend to be far more dysfunctional than the ones who can navigate more freely between “black” and “white” milieus. Integration, like globalization, is a double-edged sword, in that it comes with costs and strips people of their distinctiveness. But, just as the nations that haven’t globalized tend to be the ones with the lowest standard of living, the people who haven’t integrated tend to be the ones who have the hardest time getting by.
I have no desire to erase cultures and customs, distinct ethnic foods and ancestral connections of all sorts. But I think it’s dangerous when people Balkanize. And I think America was a much healthier society in the days of the “melting pot” than it is now in this age of the multicultural “salad bowl,” when artificially inflamed racial tensions are threatening to explode on an almost daily basis.
