Summary
1. What makes minorities succeed or fail, and why haven’t anti-discrimination laws helped them much?
British governments have tried to improve the outcomes of minorities by legislating against discrimination.
These legal interventions have not helped much because the outcomes of minorities are determined less by prejudice or racism than they are by the minorities’ own ethonocultures. A minority’s ethnoculture shapes its members’ ambitions, values and behaviour. Such traits in turn influence how much money a minority’s members will make, the chance they’ll commit a crime, how well they will do in school, their views on sexuality etc. Such differences often persist over many generations. These differences have been objectively demonstrated by Big Data.
In other words, it’s not all about white racism and oppression. It’s not even mostly about that.
2. How can we integrate minorities better, and what happens if we don’t?
Britain used to integrate new migrants passively, through organic integration. It accommodated migrants and their traditions, and expected that over time migrants would adopt British values and behaviour. But this method is no longer feasible. It’s too slow and the pressures are too great. Today’s minorities are big and superdiverse, and many have values vastly different to Britain’s. Unless we take a more muscular approach to integration, we will face enormous social difficulties and perhaps catastrophe.
Despite the importance of race and integration, no one—particularly the media and politicians—likes to talk publicly about these issues.
Many people, however, are privately worried. This points to one potential social difficulty: that an alarmed majority may give in to its fears of minorities, lashing out against them.
Another potential social difficulty is the pernicious culture of offense. People are becoming more offended about more things, a touchiness which is increasing social friction and stirring dangerous demands that freedom of expression be curtailed.
We need to implement active integration, creating an environment that more strongly incentivises and encourages minorities to integrate. Three things would help. First, organisations like workplaces and schools should be required to demonstrate that they’re promoting integration. Second, these organisations should have to publish data related to integration. This measure would enable greater scrutiny, openness, and analysis of the effects of ethnocultures. Finally, freedom of expression should be allowed in all cases, except when the speaker promotes violence or lawbreaking.
And we need to act now.
Verdict on the essay’s clarity
The essay leaves too much work to the reader. On the one hand, its sentences and paragraphs are clear. Readers will grasp the ideas of each page without much effort. On the other hand, the essay’s structure is jumbled and ill-explained. Readers will have to labour to synthesise the essay’s ideas into something ordered and cohesive. This is chiefly for three reasons.
1. The essay’s major topics have been sliced up and scattered throughout the essay. The first point in the above summary, for instance, is split across at least 7 different sections.
2. The writer scarcely guides the reader through this disarray. So it’s up to the reader to work out which of the essay’s snatches of information are connected, and to order that information into a cohesive argument.
3. When the writer does try to guide the reader, he doesn’t do so helpfully. For one, the essay’s headings don’t divide up the essay very usefully. Also, when the writer explains the essay’s structure to the reader, he explains it inaccurately. The introduction claims that the ‘essay makes the case for the defence of [the] values [of liberty and equality]; and for an entirely new approach to the downsides of diversity: active integration’. While the essay does explain active integration, it has almost nothing to say about British values and makes no case for their defence. And the essay has a lot to say about topics that the introduction doesn’t even mention.
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