The study of the integration of various cultures into a single community is an important field, as it allows us to better understand the dynamics and nature of interpersonal relations on a macro scale. For the future betterment and diversity of neighborhoods such as Ditmas Park or Jackson Heights, it is essential that we identify trends in the ever-changing population of these areas.
However, if these studies are carried out with the hopes of realizing a more accepting environment, it would seem rather counterintuitive to reify the boundaries that exist with quantitative analyses of the distribution of peoples of different ethnicities. I was rather alarmed by the statement made by Joseph J. Salvo, director of the planning department’s population division at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He said, “People are living side by side in a way that a hundred years from now we may take for granted.”
It is the maintenance of this idea (that living together with people of different ethnicities warrants study) that keeps us from full integration. The field of study that these censuses belong to perpetuates the existence of the field, itself. So long as we as a society compartmentalize its people, there will always be this desire to understand why we have not become fully “colorblind.” In this way, we are like a dog chasing our own tail.
The element of history weighs too heavily upon us to ever remove these fetters from our ethnocentric ankles. We have spent enough time on this planet together to develop natural tendencies towards associations with those who are like us. These distinctions that our complex brain sorts out automatically are biological and irreversible, regardless of how politically correct and accepting our new sensibilities have trained us to be. In one hundred years, the real shame should not be that we did not appreciate the presence of mixed communities, but that we continue to make a point of their significance.
I think you’re onto something here, but I get confused toward the end. I think I’m not sure where you stand on what classical philosophers referred to as the “state of nature.”
What’s the natural tendency? To lump or split? On one hand, I understand you to be saying that the census and social science are complicit in reifying and institutionalizing racial and ethnic categories. Huge, publicly funded efforts at categorization make categories more real, and thus prevent (a natural?) colorblindness.
But then you say that our brains make distinctions, which have developed over many thousands of years and are linked to “natural tendencies” to associate with people who are like us. Which confuses me because I thought you were suggesting that colorblindness was natural. If it’s natural to pursue “homophily” and draw categorical distinctions, then what good will it do to abandon the governmental and academic enterprise of classification?
There’s a deeper paradox here as well, which is that we only know the degree to which classification is “biological” or “cultural” by studying diverse communities and the psychological and physiological processes of those who inhabit them. A wealth of evidence suggests, in fact, that although racial cognition, and even stereotyping, is unavoidable, people differ in their culturally endowed ability to override stereotypes and other “implicit associations.” What I’m saying is that even your educated skepticism of reified categories (which I share) probably owes quite a bit to quantitative studies of social difference.
Having said all that, I agree with you in spirit. There is a very fine line between observation and creation, as phenomenologists suggested. (Even physicists agree. Sort of.)