Diversity, Self-Segregation, and a Fundamental American Paradox

What do most American small towns, Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College, and most American large cities all have in common?

Segregation - rigid, unyielding segregation. That is one of the few generalizations about those three otherwise largely unrelated spheres that I am completely comfortable establishing.

This is a particularly thorny, complicated, and even nasty issue, one that has plagued intelligent American sociologists for a very long time. Simply by being frank and honest about this touchy subject, I'll probably offend more than a few people. So why in the hell is some random business technologist attempting to provide intelligent insight into this matter?

Good question. I doubt that I'll be able to inject anything truly original into this dialog, but I nonetheless feel compelled to add my two cents because of my life experiences.

What exactly is this "fundamental American paradox" of which I'm speaking? If I had to present it in one sentence, it would be:

"In a given American environment - city, neighborhood, school, etc. - higher levels of diversity often do not lead to greater cultural intermingling, but instead to a higher degree of segregation."

Extremely counter-intuitive, isn't it? On a cursory examination, you may even disagree with me. Am I suggesting that a highly diverse place like New York City is also...highly segregated, like some small Southern village? Am I suggesting that a "highly diverse" graduate school like Heinz is more heavily segregated than, say, the University of Wisconsin? In fact, I most certainly am - that's precisely the paradox. To make things a bit clearer, I'll walk you through my life experiences to date on this issue.

I spent most of my youth in an extremely segregated small town. The town had a very negligible Latino, Asian, and interracial population, so the two primary groups were whites and blacks. 98% of the town's African Americans lived in one section of the town centered on a main thoroughfare named River Street. The white elite coterie lived either in the countryside outside of the town or in a handful of scattered neighborhoods. I lived in a middle-class area that was overwhelmingly white. Outside of work and school, there was very little interaction among these groups. Though de jure segregation may have died there several decades before I was born, de facto segregation was still the norm. The sight of an interracial couple walking down the street holding hands would have turned many heads, in addition to becoming the talk of the town for days. Other than the required tangential contact that occurs in school and in the workplace, the races largely stayed to themselves.

This was the unquestioned, normal way of life in a town that was over 30% African American - not North Dakota or Utah by any means. The story of diversity told by Census data in no manner correlated to the real-world experiences. A white person could live an entire lifetime in that town without ever truly understanding the black experience, and vice versa. To the locals - 95%+ of whom were descended from families who had lived in the area for hundreds of years - this system of rigid self-segregation was so ingrained as to be taken for granted as almost a basic existential axiom, like grass being green or rivers being composed of water.

I'm going to make a very important point here, one that is often overlooked. Particularly among the college-educated class in this country, there is a strong tendency to scapegoat "small-town Red Americans" - the types of people I largely grew up around - as the party principally culpable for any remaining vestiges of segregation and intolerance. Many white, urban liberals that I know would bristle at the mere suggestion that they, too, might be largely guilty of the same sins as their rural counterparts.

There is no better example of this than Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College - to date, the most completely and systematically segregated institution that I have ever experienced and, quite frankly, ever hope to experience. I probably know what you're thinking, and you're correct in most of your assumptions - this is an urban institution, one of the most prestigious policy schools in the country, bursting at the seams with foreign students from all over the world, unabashedly left-wing in its political orientation.

And, regardless, Heinz is every bit - quite possibly more - segregated than any typical small town in Dixie.

I was here for roughly three weeks before the remarkably troubling degree of self-segregation in this institution became painfully apparent. The most ostensible segregation is, not surprisingly, that based on nationality and ethnicity - Indian students almost exclusively associate with other Indians, Chinese with Chinese, Latinos with Latinos, and on and on. There is then a thick layer of segregation based on field of study, with the largest schism being between students studying the various information sciences related disciplines and everybody else - there is very little intermingling between those two groups (even the design of the student lounges seems to reflect this reality, with IS students sticking to the third floor and policy/arts management students remaining on the lower levels.) Various other types of segregation exist - between first and second year students, between different age levels (as a person under 25 years old, I had never experienced true age-related discrimination and nastiness until coming here), between students looking for public-sector versus private-sector careers, and even between the different administrative functions (i.e. Alumni Relations, Career Services, Financial Aid) of the college.

Students in Heinz clearly have a fundamental problem associating with "different" people - and these are among the most well-traveled, well-educated, politically progressive citizens in the country?

Perhaps the degree of de facto segregation in America's largest cities should be of no surprise to us, then. Take diverse metropolises such as New York, Chicago, and South Florida - all of them segregated to the core. For a specific example from my backyard, hyper-diverse Miami-Dade County, in fact, is the only one of the nation's 3,000+ counties in which native-born Americans are a minority, and yet it is also hyper-segregated. Latinos are found throughout the county, but are most heavily concentrated in areas to the west and southwest of downtown. Blacks are generally found in northern sections of the county such as Opa-Locka, Liberty City, and Miami Gardens. The few whites that have remained in the county generally congregate in well-to-do areas such as Pinecrest, Coral Gables, Aventura, and South Beach. And though the ethnic groups involved might be different and the lines of racial demarcation would obviously be drawn in different areas, that same general scenario could be applied to virtually every large city in this country.

When “progressive” places such as the Heinz College and Miami show such remarkable segregation, we must ask ourselves: Is the "Melting Pot" broken, or was it all just a fabulous sham to begin with?
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My impatience on this issue is very easy to explain, and I’ve already presented you with a part of the reason why. I grew up as part of an extremely rare "outsider" family in a small town, never identifying with the local culture even as nearly everyone else around me did, always having a majority of white friends in an environment where that was not expected, always making the 'A' Honor Roll when black kids were not expected to do so (and my high school guidance counselor actually stated this once – I promise that I’m not kidding you.) I was the only black kid to compete and win at science fairs, at spelling bees, at math competitions, at technology competitions, at business competitions, and on and on. I can't even begin to count the number of times in my youth that I found myself in a crowded room, looked around, and realized that I was the one and only black person there. I can't even begin to count the number of times in my youth that I found myself in a social environment - a party or get-together -, looked around, and realized that I was indeed the only black person there.

Please pardon the bluntness that is about to follow, but when you are a younger-than-average, college-educated, highly liberal, secular, gay, African American partially in the world of technology and partially in the world of business – both worlds dominated largely by conservative white men - you simply don't get the luxury of "self-segregation" at all. I have never once in my life had the luxury of being able to surround myself with a group of people who look and think exactly like me. Consequently, my level of patience for people who engage in that type of behavior - be they small town rednecks or foreign students at Heinz - is remarkably low. Their behavior irks me not just because I find it to be contrary to the American way of doing things (at least the idealized American way), but also because I think it robs diversity of its greatness. What good is diversity if people only associate with others who look and think like them?

The back of de jure segregation was broken long ago in this nation, but de facto segregation - self-segregation, or people choosing to not interact with people whom they perceive as being different from them - remains a near-universal reality. And as I have just explained, this type of segregation is not only observed in areas where you would expect to notice it - i.e., small towns that lack diversity - but also in some of the most diverse environments in the country. Less diversity ingrains segregation...but so does more diversity? Indeed, scientists might argue that this is a natural self-defense mechanism. In the more primitive days of our species, being able to immediately spot strangers was a good thing, as those strangers might intend to kill you or take your food. Evolution probably ingrained this tendency further and further into our view of the natural environment. So with self-segregation possibly even being coded into our DNA, is there any hope at all?

Again, I'm a businessman. I don't claim to have the answers to complicated sociological problems, but having lived a life that has exposed me to many facets of this issue, I do at least have some insights, comments, and suggestions.

First, we should realize that the dimensions that define "diversity" are multifaceted and aren't fixed in stone. Even in the 21st Century, many Americans hold the false view that diversity is all about making black people and white people get along without killing each other. Nearly all of my friends are under age 30, and my grandparents aren't out socializing with 20-year olds. So in that manner, our circles of friends lack a certain degree of diversity, but most would agree that this isn't really a bad thing. There has to be a certain minimal level of similarity between any two people in order for a friendship to coalesce, and we might reasonably argue that the differences between myself and an 85-year old are so severe as to make this process impossible at worst, extremely awkward at best. But this doesn't at all mean that young people should entirely exclude senior citizens from our circle of acquaintances, and they are not excluded from mine. I have an extremely strong bond with my grandparents, and enjoy my relationships with senior citizens through work experiences, which are quite enriching and mutually beneficial. Age is just one dimension of human diversity, and people need to be having these types of deep conversations with themselves about every such category - be it race, income level, career, personal ideology, religion, and on and on. Blanket exclusions of people who exhibit any characteristic - such as a circle of friends devoid of black people or Muslims - should immediately be cause for alarm. On a purely logical basis, how could you possibly know what you might have in common with those groups if you never associate with them?

Next, we should dismantle the belief that the very notion of assimilation is a sort of "racist American" thing, yet another attempt by people in the USA to impose their worldview on every other group in the world. By this claim, I exhibit "typical American prejudice" when I criticize foreign Heinz students, such as Indian and Chinese students, who virtually never associate with students not from their own nation. I do, of course, realize that America is largely unique among nations because of our background of mass immigration and cultural fusion. But segregation is segregation, period, and segregation is not a positive societal attribute, whether that society is American or otherwise - anybody who believes otherwise would be best advised to read a good history of the Balkan Peninsula. The greatest strength of this nation, to me, is our ability to bring together people from all over the world in peaceful coexistence; in other words, our ability to foster diversity and squelch the types of idiotic, baseless divisions that cause untold strife and suffering in so many other nations. There is nothing at fault about this paradigm, and a key part of becoming an American - regardless of from where you may draw your origins - is realizing that an American identity transcends national origins and whatever petty divisions may have existed in your home country. At Heinz, I have been to parties where I was the only American student surrounded by Chinese students, the only American student surrounded by Indian students, and on and on - and I was not made the least bit uncomfortable by such settings, though I would have preferred to see more diversity from other nations. When I invite people to social gatherings, the thought of a person's national origin never crosses my mind - I invite friends, not "friends from certain nationalities." That is the American way, of which Heinz has established a rather poor example. When I walk into a random Heinz classroom and immediately notice all of the Indians sitting in one area, all of the Chinese sitting in another, and all of the Americans huddled in yet another corner, I want to scream at the top of my lungs. This is not the type of behavior that we should celebrate and uphold in America.

On the other hand, to be fair, people whose roots extend back centuries and centuries in America often aren't much better in terms of promoting diversity within their lives. Indeed, the American tale of seamless ethnic integration has often seemed more like a fairy tale than an accurate portrayal of history. Countless examples of racial segregation - blacks in the South, the Irish in the Northeast, Hispanics in the Southwest, the Japanese in California - serve as recurring sordid footnotes to our history. And of course, many would argue that self-segregation is a necessary prerequisite to full assimilation. Ohio River cities such as Louisville and Cincinnati absorbed so many German immigrants in the latter part of the 19th Century that they had German language newspapers for a period and thriving de facto German districts; many historians argue that these types of closely knit communities enabled the newly arrived immigrants to support each other and learn the culture and customs of the new land more rapidly, even as they did their own part to shape and enrich our shared American customs. Within a few generations, the grandchildren of those German immigrants had so fully assimilated into our culture that they would have bristled at the notion of being labeled "foreigners" - even while, of course, they retained many cultural elements and traditions unique to their German heritage. This process occurs more effectively and efficiently in the United States than in any other nation, but we are far, far from perfect. Even decades after arriving in the USA, some immigrants still cling to their own local communities and rarely intermingle with others. Some long-established Americans view foreigners as strange corruptions to our nation, as made apparent by the level of vitriol surrounding the debate over the border fence with Mexico. And of course, even amongst themselves Americans rigidly self-segregate into cliques centered on race, geographical region, socioeconomic situation, and on and on.

The paradox between diversity and self-segregation mentioned earlier often surfaces with the arrival of a certain "critical mass" of immigrants. Any given environment has a certain "assimilative capacity." A sole immigrant arriving into a foreign land will be forced to quickly learn the appropriate customs if he wishes to survive. If a group of immigrants is so large, however, as to be able to form a self-supporting unit or clique, they can slow down the assimilative process to a certain degree by existing inside of their own isolated group. And then, it occasionally occurs that a group is so large - or perhaps so different from prevailing cultural norms - that the assimilative capacity of a local environment is exceeded. In other words, the natives of the environment do not exert significant enough influence to be able to force assimilation upon the outside group; the immigrant group is thus able to exist for an extended amount of time, perhaps indefinitely, without fully assimilating or accepting the local culture. Over time, the local culture may even become the culture of the immigrant group. This is not a positive process because it invites self-segregation and cultural Balkanization. Miami-Dade County is probably the best example in the country; after decades and decades of absorbing gargantuan quantities of arriving immigrants, the county's assimilative capacity was finally - and sharply - exceeded sometime in the 1980's after the Mariel Boat Lift. As scholars Portes and Stepick argued in the work City on The Edge, Hispanics in Dade County had reached such a large number that they were able to exist as a distinct group free from the cultural prerogatives of the "white elite." The immigrants, as a group, were so large in number that the Americans were not able to fully assimilate them, and the culture of Dade County began to shift from one dominated by white Americans from the Northeast to one with a distinctly Latino identity. Whites, unwilling to live in what many started to characterize as a "foreign" environment, began to flee the county for Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, other parts of Florida, or other states entirely. Dade County today is roughly 62% Latino and 12% White European American, a product of a decades-long continuation of the above process. I would argue that a similar process has occurred within the IS programs at Heinz; the ratio of foreign students to Americans is so remarkably high - at maximum a dozen out of 150 MISM students in my year are native-born American, for example - that foreign students are able to fully exist within their own cliques without ever fully attempting to integrate into the fabric of American life, which would entail intermingling with people from other nations. Self-segregation, thus, runs its natural course in this particular Heinz program, as it did in Dade County. And in both cases, I would argue that the process has done more to harm true diversity than to promote it.

We're better than nearly any other nation at the process of assimilation - but nobody is saying that we're perfect, after all.

As stated earlier, those of us in educated, urban environments need to rid ourselves of the silly notion that the problem of self-segregation is a rural one, something applicable to Danville, Illinois but not to Los Angeles or Chicago. Self-segregation exists everywhere, and it is just as insidious in an environment such as Heinz as it is in any random small town. We need to look at our own circles of friends and be willing to step outside of our comfort zones. I personally acknowledge a need to increase the number of African Americans in my own personal circle (an extremely complicated and lifelong process, but more on that later) and I jump on any viable opportunities that present themselves to do just that. To me, though, the key point is that diversity is ingrained into my very personality and behavior. When I enter a room, I do not immediately look for a group of African Americans with whom to associate. On countless occasions at Heinz, I have seen this type of behavior - the example of the classroom sectionally divided along nationalities is a great example, with students from one nation almost instinctively seeking to sit next to students from the same nation. This demonstrates comfort zone behavior, and promoting diversity requires us all to be willing to step outside of our "comfort zone" boundaries and start a conversation with a person who may appear to be quite different from us - and, very often, we can be quite surprised at the similarities that we may find.

Finally, a note should be made on the importance of policy in this area. Policy will not change hearts by itself, policy will not magically integrate a highly segregated environment, policy will not force people to step outside of their comfort zones, policy will not force full cultural assimilation on groups that have largely rejected that process - but it can be an extremely effective tool in pushing that process forward. For example, the power of Affirmative Action has been well-documented in its ability to bring at least superficial diversity to otherwise rigidly segregated areas, which is a crucial start; there were remarkable gains in diversity at Florida's state universities until Jeb Bush eradicated much of that progress with his "One Florida" initiative. Here at Heinz, a few simple changes - integrating student lounge areas across fields of study, hosting social events that forced students from different nationalities to sit next to each other, forcing students from different nationalities to work in groups inside of classes, offering the same sections of core classes such as Statistics and Management Science to different programs - would go a long way towards breaking the type of rigid and ubiquitous self-segregation that is so commonplace. In the corporate world, paying lip service to diversity isn't going to cut it in our increasingly globalized world. Corporate boards of directors with 12 white men plus one token minority or one token female must become a thing of the past, lest we wish to lose every ounce of our remaining competitive advantage. When hiring and promotion decisions are made, every single executive should be questioning whether or not they are doing their part to encourage and promote diversity, which certainly does not mean rewarding unqualified people, but instead removing the lens which leads us to assume that people who are "like us" are the best suited for a position.

In summary, my formula for success on this tricky issue would combine an ability to critically analyze the very definition of "diversity", a knowledge of our own imperfect American history on the matter, a strong willingness on the part of each and every individual to promote diversity within their own lives and call out others who don't do so, and policy prescriptions that effectively work to break the back of de facto segregation.

It's a start - wouldn't life be so much easier if our biggest problems had easy solutions?