America is one of the most ethnicly diverse nations on the planet. We have enjoyed the benefits that the diversity brings to our country but also are a victim of its negatives. Sadly, these negatives normally fade away through the process of assimiliation, but these days to many people derive power from division and so stoke the tensions created by identity politics for personal gain.
Repeated studies on diversity have pointed to increased levels of violence in those societies... Here is one study's conclusion (I encourage you to read others)...
"pluralism [as a source of violence] is important, but less so than other aspects of society. And the importance largely resides in the number of ethnic and religious groups a state has. This does confirm Smith's belief that there is a relationship between social pluralism and violence, although in specifics the results depart from his theory. He believed that pluralism had a much stronger causal effect on collective violence and that certain aspects of pluralism, such as the hierarchical distribution of power among plural units, their segmentation, and corporate nature would be the main predictors."
I find this study is interesting in that it concludes that diversity leads to violence, but then postulates that the violence is more specifically grounded in what our country calls indentity politics whether at the "urban gang" level or the national political level". When you pit groups against one another... well go watch the movie "West Side Story" to see what happens.
What this conclusion suggests is that when politicians and other social leaders use "identity politics" to pit us against one another they create "ethnic, religious, or racial" power groups that contribute to subsequent violence. Should we not condemn politicians for this behavior... Biden promised to heal the nation and since taking office has done the opposite... when will we get a President that truly tries to heal the nation and abandons identity politics?
MLK was right, only when we abandon our "identities" as members of some identity group and embrace ourselves and others as distinct individuals, who should be judged on their characters are we going to escape the kind of violence we are seeing.
