[lbo-talk] black vote

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Wed Sep 7 09:35:32 PDT 2005


Chris:
> That was true at the time, when being from Poland or
> Ireland or wherever was actually important to White
> Americans, and is probably true now insofar as one is
> talking about immigrants from Latin America. But
> nobody White in the US past a first or
> second-generation immigrant (like me, moved to the
> States when I was 5) really cares where their
> ancestors are from beyond them being from Europe.
> Similarly, immigrants from places as different as
> Argentina and El Salvador all become "Latinos."
> Whereas in Russia, if your ancestors were Poles or
> Germans, you are STILL a Pole or a German, not a
> Russian, even if your family has been living in Russia
> since the 1700s, and it said it on your passport too
> up until new ones got issued in 1996 or so. (You _are_
> a "rossiyanin," but that just means "person who lives
> in Russia," and has no ethnic meaning.) The tendency
> is toward preservation of difference, not subsumption
> of it. In fact the number of official Russian
> nationalities is multiplying, not shrinking --
> Cossacks finally got themselves declared an ethnicity
> in 1992, and a group of Christian Tatars who wanted to
> distinguish themselves from Muslim Tatars did the same thing.

That may be true to a point, but the issue is not mere statistical diversity i.e. the probability that two randomly selected individuals belong to two different ethnic groups (aka the heterogeneity coefficient). Far more important is what for the lack of a better term I call "cognitive diversity" or tolerance of and interest in groups different than one's own. Unlike the statistical diversity, which is simply a probability function and thus continuous, the cognitive diversity is context dependent, discrete, and selective - one may be open for diversity of one kind but not for another, or openness for diversity may be correlated with other forms of social diversification, such as socio-economic class, collective mythologies pertaining to different social groups, past experiences, etc.

What you are referring to is a specific type of cognitive diversity maintained by the officialdom (i.e. official recognition of various ethnic groups) , which is relatively absent in the modern US comparing to, say, Japan or Europe. But unlike statistical diversity, cognitive diversities cannot be compared because they are qualitatively different - since they are grounded in perceptions as much as in reality. What is more or less diverse a mild intolerance of most other groups (which on average characterizes the US) or tolerance of some but intense intolerance of others (which characterizes Russia?

Wojtek



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