Long ago, Jimmy Carter led a public embrace of the bonkers fallacy that all cultures are equally admirable and that the United States needed to become more “multi-cultural.” That was a disastrous turn in the American journey, and I am happy to say that I recognized it immediately at the time, along with many others of course. Carter’s fact-free conceit, one of his many disastrous moves in his rotten Presidency, gave us the illegal immigration wave, Spanish language prompts in phone trees, DEI, McDonald clerks who can’t speak understandable English and persistent ethnic underclasses, among other maladies.
Christoper Rufo, in his City Journal entry, “It’s Not “Racist” to Notice Somali Fraud: The recent scandal reveals an uncomfortable truth: different cultures lead to different outcomes,” writes clearly, persuasively and correctly about a truth that American once grasped but increasingly do not thanks to poor education and “it isn’t what it is” propaganda.
He writes in part,
“First, a description of the facts should not be measured as “racist or not racist,” but rather as “true or not true.” And in this case, the truth is that numerous members of a relatively small community participated in a scheme that stole billions in funds. This is a legitimate consideration for American immigration policy, which is organized around nation of origin and, for more than 30 years, has favorably treated Somalis relative to other groups. It is more than fair to ask whether that policy has served the national interest. The fraud story suggests that the answer is “no.”
Second, the fact that Somalis are black is incidental. If Norwegian immigrants were perpetrating fraud at the same alleged scale and had the same employment and income statistics as Somalis, it would be perfectly reasonable to make the same criticism and enact the same policy response. It would not be “racist” against Norwegians to do so.
Further, Somalis have enormously high unemployment rates, and federal law enforcement have long considered Minneapolis’s Little Mogadishu neighborhood a hotspot for terrorism recruitment. We should condemn that behavior without regard to skin color.
The underlying question—which, until now, Americans have been loath to address directly—is that of different behaviors and outcomes between different groups. Americans tend to avoid this question, rely on euphemisms, and let these distinctions remain implied rather than spoken aloud. Yet it seems increasingly untenable to maintain this Anglo-American courtesy when the Left has spent decades insisting that we conceptualize our national life in terms of group identity.
The reality is that different groups have different cultural characteristics. The national culture of Somalia is different from the national culture of Norway. Somalis and Norwegians therefore tend to think differently, behave differently, and organize themselves differently, which leads to different group outcomes. Norwegians in Minnesota behave similarly to Norwegians in Norway; Somalis in Minnesota behave similarly to Somalis in Somalia. Many cultural patterns from Somalia—particularly clan networks, informal economies, and distrust of state institutions—travel with the diaspora and have shown up in Minnesota as well. In the absence of strong assimilation pressures, the fraud networks aren’t so surprising; they reflect the extension of Somali institutional norms into a new environment with weak enforcement and poorly designed incentives.
The beauty of America is that we had a system that thoughtfully balanced individual and group considerations. We recognized that all men, whatever their background, have a natural right to life, liberty, property, and equal treatment under the law. We also recognized that group averages can be a basis for judgment—especially in immigration, where they can help determine which potential immigrant groups are most suitable and advantageous for America.
Well, bingo.
I have never understood the furious hatred the news media and others have for Christopher Rufo, who is regularly described as a racist (so that his excellent analysis can be derided and ignored). Rufo is a clear thinker, a scholar, a truth-teller and an excellent writer. Even Wikipedia implies he’s racially biased—I sure wish Grokipedia would get its act together so I never have to use Wikipedia again.
Social media has allowed ethnic groups to descend on small towns and cities to form tight communities with no intention of assimilating. The result is members of Congress with loyalties abroad (Rep. Omar being the Somali example) and toxic cultures that have proven to be failures where they developed continuiing to wreak further damage here.
Rufo is right to say that recognizing a destructive cultural trend in a group is not bias or prejudice, but acknowledging reality. Chicago’s anti-white, communist, incompetent Democratic mayor has said that incarcerating criminals is racist, because it results in a disproportionate number of blacks in prisons—-upside-down, inside-out reasoning if I ever heard it. He is pushing the same fallacy dictating that immigrants arriving with a group culture antithetical to American values can’t be criticized for that culture or required to change.
Ethics Alarms 
“We also recognized that group averages can be a basis for judgment—especially in immigration, where they can help determine which potential immigrant groups are most suitable and advantageous for America.”
If group averages can be a basis for judgment in matters of immigration, does that also extend to other areas than immigration? E.g. would it be ethical to take group averages into account in hiring decisions, or decisions to whom you rent out an apartment? Hereby my assumption is that these decisions either do not break a law, or that it cannot be proven that a law has been broken.
I would say basing hiring, renting, or other such 1-on-1 decisions on group averages is unethical. Averages don’t tell you anything for certain about the individual, and it’s the individual you are supposed to be judging in these kind of situations. That being said, the average may explain why, in the vetting process, you get better candidates from some pools than others. For example If you toss aside every application with a “black-sounding” name without even looking it over, that’s wrong. You could be missing out on some good candidates, who could be doing their darndest to escape the negative black stereotypes. But, it could be when you look over the resumes, do the interviews, and be as fair as possible, you could still have better quality white candidates than black ones, in your particular neck of the woods, for this particular position. That’s a bummer, but if you’ve done your due dilligence it’s not your fault and nobody should blame you.
Let me play devil’s advocate here.
Good job at playing DA, BUT:
1. Big difference between deciding to rent to an individual and opening one’s nation up to many participants in a toxic culture who are liable to flock together, as we have seen in Minnesota…
2. All true. Hence I frequently hired members of a group that I felt needed a break despite being topped by candidates from a more candidates from the majority pool. And I had a disproportionate number of bad outcomes…but kept trying, because each individual deserved a change regardless of my experience with his or her group.
3. Or: “stereotypes are true but incomplete.”
4. Natural and often beneficial, but unless analysis is applied with the bias, they make us do stupid things.
5. Yes, but at the risk of missing out on a motivated, talented worker who just requires a chance.
6. Not per se. But the essence of ethics is concer for one’s society and fellow members of it, sometimes at the cost of self-interest.
7. Which is why ethics is more current but also more difficult to use than morality.
8. Well, except in absolutist systems. But even in those, there wil be exceptions.
9. True. One canot trust someone with an alien value system.
10. Absolutely. But a society may also justifiably conclude that it is in the interest of that society to limit the landlord’s discretion.
11. No. What needs to be reconsidered is the false assertion that all cultures are equally valid.
If anyone in this country is familiar with, much less understands, the idea of the social contract, that person would probably agree that importing large numbers of people from a culture that rejects such a contract is a bad idea.
There is the individual social contract, in which persons sublimate some of their yens in order to live in a people society with other persons doing the same. Then there are cultural contracts in which groups sublimate some of their own yens to live among other differing groups.
Sadly, knowledge of Enlightenment philosophers is nearly as dead as knowledge of the Founding Fathers who based many of their ideas about our country on those philosophers.
That’s where the poor education in Western Civilization has brought us. The idea that we are solely a corrupt, white, Christian patriarchal society that routinely oppresses and that all we need is a little color and spice in our lives to fix things has driven this attempt to tribalize communities in the name of diversity. The result has been the importation of cultures that have no intention of assimilating and have zero respect for American values, such as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press or Freedom of Association (except where they can use those values to further their own tribal interests), seemingly interested only in profiting economically off of our largess while slowly turning our country into the ones from which they fled.
Obviously, there is a difference between generalizing all Somalis as grifters and pointing out that the culture as a whole has not benefited and has rather suffered by the arrival of a large group of unassimilated people who see us only as the Golden Goose.
When did it stop being acceptable to call a duck a duck?
Comment of the Day
Exactly. In Africa, it’s called, “getting over.” Defrauding their governments is basically the national pastime in shithole African countries. This was explained to me by a Uganda-born client. And of course, the citizens consider themselves justified in ripping off their government because the people running the government are kleptocrats who are doing the same thing. So yes, of course, the Somalis treat the government like a pinata and whack away with glee.