Racial/Cultural Segregation is Natural to Us

It just occurred (ghah! that's the third time I've tried to spell that; is it two see's and two ar's?...OK I've got it...) to me while reading this bit of Kathy's on Michael Coren's bit for the Sun.

Another murder in a Canadian black community, this time the victim being 11-years old. And it took only moments for white liberal politicians to blame law-abiding handgun owners and, yes, the United States of America.

(Michael is frequently a fatuous blowhard, but is, nonetheless, just as often right.)

It's about how in every place where there are a lot of Jamaicans, there's a lot of them killing each other over drugs and prostituting their sisters. These are facts, but of course, in our times, truth is no excuse for political incorrectness.

But it's made me think of something else that's incorrect to say. But it's true isn't it?

In every place where a lot of different cultures mix, like Toronto, they don't.

Mix, I mean.

I've lived in "ethnically diverse" places all my life. Victoria, as I have said, had to ethnicities: Anglican and Chinese. Later we added White Hippie. And none of them mixed.

In Toronto, even in the Parkdale melting pot, the races and groups stubbornly refuse to melt. And immigration system that allows extended families, ultimately entire villages, to come in en masse, you are simply transplanting, repotting, entire cultural ecosystems and plopping them into existing communities who then flee the invasion of the aliens. Parkdale is a perfect example. The only white people who live here are the people that got dumped out when the government picked up the local loony bin and shook out the loose change.

But everywhere in Toronto, we have accepted (and often liked to have) neighbourhoods we call "ethnic". It's great for people who like to get authentic Tamil food, but not so good when we get everthing else that comes with Tamils...if ya get me.

It's not so bad with the Portugese or Italians or even the Chinese whose preferred forms of cultural criminality tend to involve less street warfare. It became a problem when we started thinking maybe we should have Pakistani, Somalian and Lebanese restaurants too.

But the multicultural argument seems to be fairly simple. Other cultures are interesting and good. We like everyone. So we should all live together.

But we don't. We naturally clump together into groups of people. We like to hang out with people who speak the same language, eat the same food, who don't look weird, who have the same conscious and semi-conscious cultural presuppositions. I'm sure the Philipina ladies find it incomprehensible that we white anglos sit in church like statues and flatly refuse to bring a helpful and useful crackly plastic shopping bag of doodads to play with. ("How on earth do they get through an hour long Mass without anything to fiddle with, or holy cards to pray along with, or snackies to give the kids? These anglos are weird!")

I have observered a funny rule on the bus. In close quarters, particularly in hot sticky weather, all the other people, that is, every other human being on the bus, is your mortal enemy. And for no other reason than that they are another human being who is taking up space. It is an offense that other people are on the same bus as you. That they dare to stand or sit next to you. If you are on the bus with a friend, he becomes an ally in this universal enmity. You look at each other and roll your eyes when yet another goddam human being gets on the bus. You and your friend are your tribe in a space that is eight feet wide by thirty feet long.

Take that theory and expand it into enclosed spaces the size of Toronto (or London or Birmingham or Manchester) neighbourhoods, and you suddenly see why multiculturalism has failed so miserably.

The theory is wrong.

We don't like everyone. We think we ought to like everyone, but we really only like people in our own tribe.

And that's the way it is supposed to be.