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Comment by cirath | Hacker News Reader

Woah now, let's not make any wild leaps here.

The Roman Empire was fantastically multicultural at its high points and its low. The United States has never been homogeneous, no matter where in its history you find yourself -- the low or the high points.

In fact, I (and many others) would argue that a lot of the meteoric rise of the United States occurred on the backs of labor that did not match the current ideals of those far enough right to want a homogeneous United States -- whether it was black slavery, cheap Chinese labor, late 19th century immigration towards the American Dream...

There is more to the equation than homogeneity is what I am saying here.

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The most stereotypically dangerous areas (where you get the stories that drive a lot of the helicopter parenting and such) are also highly stratified and segregated ones. New York, LA, Chicago are known for their high-crime areas, but also have money and cost of living presenting far harder barriers to integrated, multicultural local neighborhoods than anyway in the more-stereotypically-"actively racist" urban southern part of the country.

My 80s/90s childhood was one of "high-trust" ethnic diversity in just such a place, since my family didn't run in the elite, isolated-private-school/gated-suburbs circles. I had friends of every background, and so did most everyone else I knew, it was just how things were, not some liberal hollywood propaganda job. Somewhere like inside-the-perimeter Atlanta isn't perfect by any means, but it's actual diversity seems to make it way less sneakily unintentionally racist than NYC or SF. Or, worse, someone in random-white-person-ville small midwestern town who hears about Chicago gangs in the news.

And now I see a bunch of people online scared of / angry about diversity or its portrayals who seem completely confused by the concept of a boba joint with local latinos, blacks, whites, and asians all as customers in the same shop - cause if a movie portrayed a group like that, you know it would get called out for "SJW brainwashing" - so it seems like the argument is completely backward. The more you actually encounter and interact with people who don't share your ethnicity, the more trust you build. While the more you segregate minorities into clusters of poverty and desperation, the more you'll fear crime and so on.

That idea is not new, either -- we just have a collective propensity to forget hard lessons.

>Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. -Mark Twain

The strange irony is that you no longer have to travel very far to meet a broad range of people, but still so many avoid leaving their gated communities.

I don't know if he's really worth responding to, but it really depends on your definition of 'homogeneous'. Historically, the US was certainly much more homogeneous in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

You mention Chinese labor, for example, but the Asian presence in the US was below 1% until 1980. There were only three demographics that really existed in any numbers in US history up until the past few decades: Native Americans (mostly genocided or blended with other categories, and not counted as part of the population until this happened), whites (80-90% until 1980s), and the black people who were mostly either slaves or descended from slaves (fluctuated between 10 and 20%). Since the 1980s, the Hispanic population has seen a massive upsurge, with Asians also increased as a proportion of the population by almost 5x, and "Other" going from basically 0% to 6%.

This is not exactly a diverse picture, even if it isn't 100% homogeneous.

> The Roman Empire was fantastically multicultural at its high points and its low.

Citation needed. As far as I am aware from my understanding of history, Roman Empire was very large geographically but there were homogeneous cultures / tribes living in separate areas of the vast empire. You had Germanic tribes living together in proximity, same with Gauls, Eastern tribes like Vandals or Visigoths, local cultures also inhabited parts of Roman Empire outside of European continent such as Northern Africa or Israel.

This should be evident as Europe was very homogeneous until early 20th century still with societies being mainly composed of similar peoples in their respective areas and this was obviously a continuation of Roman Empire’s former tribes.

Trying to make a comparison with current world where you have melting pots in places like London or New York might be inaccurate. But I’d like to be educated on this issue more.

The Roman empire contained a lot of geographically segregated cultures. There was definitely a lot of influence on each other over time but 'when in Rome' didn't come out of nowhere.

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