The Racial Diversity and Social Cohesion Debate
A quick commentary
A common talking point for anyone who has been on the dissident right long enough is that racial diversity is negatively associated with social cohesion. Unlike discussions of race differences which is taboo, contrary to what some may claim, discussions of the negative effects of diversity (which is just a subtler way of discussing the same issue) remains acceptable within the political mainstream. In recent years however, there has been more critical commentary towards the notion that diversity decreases trust, including from hereditarians (Black, 2024; Kirkegaard, 2022; Last, 2018). This raises a question: how should we interpret these results? What are the implications of these findings? Does it matter? I figured since I have some time right now, I’d drop my own thoughts on this debate.
A common critique towards the literature showing the negative relationship between racial diversity and social cohesion is the issue of causality. Yes, it’s been replicated over and over again that more diverse areas generally have lower levels of trust than more homogenous areas, but is this relationship causal? Does the presence of other races directly lower trust in that area? People critical of this view will generally point out that once a host of variables are controlled for, then the effects of racial diversity itself either disappears or becomes extremely small. I’m willing to accept these findings at face value, as personally I don’t see any serious methodological flaws with most of the studies cited. Okay, so racial diversity is not itself causal with lowering social cohesion, or if it is, the effects are minor at best, so now what? Functionally speaking, nothing changes. See, this is the problem with discussions on correlation-causation sometimes, it’s that it makes sense in models, but it’s much more gray when translated into the real world. People don’t realize that for all these studies, they’re not saying that racial diversity is good or that diversity doesn’t matter, just that diversity, independent of all other possible variables, is not particularly harmful, and this is kind of obvious. Trust is not going to magically collapse because you were walking down the streets and happened to see a black man, it’s all the baggage that’s probably going to come with him (rape, murder, drugs, poverty, loud annoying rap music, etc.) that you’re worried about. In other words, while diversity itself is not causal with reduced trust, it might as well be for the most part. Yes, you could probably find a bunch of studies that collectively say that if you control for things like IQ, homeownership, marital status, unemployment, and blah blah blah, then diversity doesn’t have any effect, but in the real world, these things are strongly correlated with race, and these differences are a function of aggregate genetic differences between races. What these studies are really saying is “if a high IQ, diligent, wealthy, well-mannered black person moves to an all-white neighborhood, trust will most likely not be negatively affected”, and that’s fine and all, but how many of these blacks are there? Not that many, and certainly it’s not the majority of blacks by any means. Because of this, we can fully expect that having blacks and Hispanics around will indeed lower social cohesion in a majority of cases, maybe it’s possible to pick out a few exceptional individuals and say otherwise for them, but that’s about it. At the end of the day, nothing really changes because these are group differences that time and time again have proven itself to be resilient against any sort of intervention designed at equalizing outcomes. At best, the most extreme change would be going from advocating for closed borders to some kind of highly selective limited immigration, but because of race differences in regression toward the mean, even that isn’t a given.
Another thing, when someone talks about “historical circumstances” that have enabled two distinct peoples to coexist, those are usually extremely situational. It’s usually a very delicate peace, and more often than not we’re talking about two ethnic groups belonging to the same race, and not anything like trying to make Europeans and subsaharan Africans get along. Moreover, these unique circumstances are completely non-applicable to the conversation of trying to stop the third world from flooding into the West today. What does Belgium’s existence have to do with blacks and Hispanic making the United States worse off year-by-year? Literally nothing. Or, they’ll try to rewrite history to make a ridiculous claim like the Roman Empire being an example of a supposedly multicultural society that didn’t have sentiments of nationalism and prejudice, which is just straight up false. Keep in mind by the way that saying “group X and group Y have successfully refrained themselves from attempting to genocide each other” is not a good justification for promoting more diversity, having the streets not run red with blood is the bare minimum most people would expect from a functioning society.
Conversely, when someone talks about how it’s because of “historical animosity” that made trust difficult, that is literally playing into our hands. Why did this animosity just so happen to conveniently fall along ethnic or racial lines? Whether it was in the past or today, we were never selecting strictly for outsiders who were perfectly compatible with the dominant majority, and so the result of that has consistently been that the differences were amplified and became increasingly apparent over time, and what came out of it was and still is conflict and distrust. There’s this idea being thrown around by some people known as contact theory which proposes that if different races interact with each other meaningfully, then this will reduce the hostility between racial groups. This sounds nice and all, but the evidence for this is flawed. For instance, in support of contact theory, Stolle et al. (2008) used self-reported survey measures and found that the negative relationship between diversity and trust is partially mediated by interaction between different races, and that people who talk to their neighbors and have more interactions with different races are less likely to have their trust negatively affected. However, using measures of self-reported contact and trust from the same survey results in common method bias which inflates the relationship between contact and trust, and once a more objective measure is employed, this relationship disappears (Dinesen & Sønderskov, 2015). The evidence in support of contact theory also disappears once publication bias is corrected for (Paluck et al., 2019).
Ultimately, the correlation-causation debate on racial diversity and social cohesion, while insightful, isn’t as important as one may initially think. People on the dissident right have no need to get overly alarmed with all these studies showing that it’s not causal or that the effect is small, it hardly changes the objective at all. The real issue is that we’re not allowed to speak directly on the issue of race itself and we’re forced to use all of these dogwhistles, “diversity hurts trust” being one of them. What we need is to finally be allowed to talk about these topics without being censored left and right and relegated to nothing more than the status of NEET schizo fringes on the internet, and I think the real reason why the critique of the literature surrounding diversity and trust scares so many people is simply because it’s one of the last remaining talking points that has any real ability to bring about any significant change in the mainstream political discourse. But of course, this just reveals a far more serious underlying problem, that being that we are forbidden from getting our ideas across, and ultimately, that’s what needs to change in order for anything to get done, and not just beating around the bush with this one talking point.