Sailer on Jacoby

An e-mail to Steve Sailer on the unintended consequences of assimilationism:

Your comment at Amazon.com on Tamar Jacoby’s book on immigration is very clever.

Here’s my summary and gloss:

Even as we (i.e., white Americans) affirm that immigrants of all backgrounds can assimilate, we’ve dropped all efforts to assimilate them, indicating that we think assimilation is automatic. But because in practical affairs we actually know that lots of people are really very different from each other, AND since we are no longer willing to employ common standards to help different people assimilate to each other and so get along better, we end up very carefully choosing our own associates only from those who already are very similar to us. So, for example, today’s parents look for “good schools,” meaning schools with students whose IQs are similar to those of their own children, meaning basically white, middle-class schools. This shows that the parents do not believe that very different people can get along productively, i.e., it shows that they don’t really believe in assimilation. Further, since we’ve given up any attempt to assimilate different people through enforceable common standards, such as America once had, any differences between children become even more troublesome than before, making it even more necessary for parents to find schools with children who are just like their own children.

Thus the belief in effortless assimilation results in people segregating themselves more than ever, just as the belief that all people are equal in innate abilities leads to the conclusion that anyone with lesser abilities than those of some other group is a defective human being, rather than simply a person with lesser abilities. These two egalitarian beliefs both result in their own opposite. The belief in sameness or effortless assimilation leads to segregation; while the belief in the equality of abilities of all persons leads to the conclusion that a large part of the human race, even entire races and peoples, are innately defective. And, of course, to avoid that horrible thought, it becomes more urgent than ever to believe that the real cause of the inequalities is racism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 01, 2004 12:12 AM | Send