38 Comments

Best quote I've seen this week:

'It’s almost as if “diversity” means whatever anyone needs it to mean at any given time to push their daily agenda of convenience'

Expand full comment
Jun 14Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

I feel like you missed a very obvious "definition of diversity" that New York might win:

Most People

Or also:

Most different ethnicities/languages represented

Or also (hat tip to the MIB movies):

Most aliens disguised as people.

Expand full comment

Maybe they mean it’s the most Jewish? Apparently like 11.2% of New Yorkers are Jewish. But this is nowhere near as much as other regions that are black, Asian, or American Indian, so just using Jewish to mean diverse is a very strange metric even if in most places only 1% or less of the population is Jewish.

Expand full comment

We didn't even touch on the fact that any data source used almost certainly suffers from terminal muddling of people's definition of "white", "black", etc. One drop rule, anyone?

Expand full comment

I fail to understand why diversity of one’s most superficial characteristic matters at all.

Expand full comment

Because of the social constructs based on those differences, of course. It matters because most of the country believes it matters, in various ways.

Expand full comment

I'm willing to bet there's really only *one* race of people in New York. Humans. :D

Expand full comment

Yes, I know that this is a significant departure from my usual claim that New Yorkers *aren't* actually people...

Expand full comment

I would think any real analysis of diversity would need to breakdown racial categories in a lot more granularity than Black/White/Latino/Asian/Other. There really isn't that much that's the same between Indians/Chinese/Indonesians other than geographic proximity. Feels somewhat the same kind of playing around with statistics as you fight against when people include suicide deaths in overall gun death statistics. You're aggregating subcategories that obfuscates the underlying reality.

So I'm still going to keep considering NYC the most diverse city because I'm pretty sure the sheer number of various sizeable communities of nationalities/ethnicities you'll find there is higher than any other city. Could be wrong, but I'd need someone to do a more granular analysis to prove it.

Expand full comment

Right. The only analytic method here that remotely makes sense to me is the HHI "shares" approach, but as given that uses only the broadest census categories. Apply the analysis instead to people's actual working self-identifications, including both "race" and other ethnicities that the census doesn't consider racial, and I'm sure the spread between most and least diverse places gets a lot bigger.

Just the "white" people in NYC are more diverse than white people in newer, smaller, and inland cities (each of which factors tends to reduce the number of immigrant origins and recombinations to be found).

Expand full comment

So it's a fact, not a viewpoint, that NYC has more languages spoken than any other city in the US; and Queens is globally recognized as perhaps the most ethnically diverse population center in the world. We are talking about people from every corner of the globe, not just the traditional minorities. Not sure where you are getting this data, but for me it does not add up, nor does it seem like the writer has very much familiarity with NYC's actual population.

Expand full comment
author

NYC Metro: 20 million

Queens: 2 million

This draws attention to another possible divergence between the census based analysis I ran and the Wallethub analysis - I was going off of metro area numbers and they may be going off of city boundaries.

Expand full comment

“More languages *commonly* spoken? NY? OK, but more total languages spoken could probably be claimed by Salt Lake City due to the number of returned missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and all of the languages used in their teaching. But that wouldn’t meet the demands of the DEI Police. My own thought on diversity claims is that the more adjectives that are used in a claim, the less impressive the accomplishment.

Expand full comment

You'll actually find more an hour south, in Provo, where I think BYU keeps the LDS membership rate significantly higher than in SLC.

Of course, they're mostly white folks, so, y'know.

Fun anecdote: I noticed that Provo has this awkward phenomenon where you'll go somewhere with a friend, and then end up practically alone because said friend has gotten caught up in an excited conversation in Portuguese with a random passerby.

Expand full comment

Im sorry, your answer does not compute. Are you actually trying to say that Salt Lake City is more diverse than NYC? I will have to take a powder.

Expand full comment

What I tried to say in this and other posts here is that diversity is in the eye of the beholder. My apologies if that was not clear. I will also say that diversity, as defined by physical attributes or cultural cues, does not, in itself, confer any benefit on the group under consideration. Diversity of thought, on the other hand, does have benefits in some situations. We are all children of a loving Heavenly Father; it is our minds/souls, and actions that matter, not our appearance or language. Diversity has become a false god of the American Left, and hopefully we can push ourselves beyond that limitation on our society.

Expand full comment

I mean, I'm pretty sure he's cited his sources here, but also the point is more that attempting to rank "diversity" really depends on which definition you're using. "Number of languages commonly spoken" is certainly an option (albeit still probably a proxy for something like "number of distinct cultures represented"), it's just not one he's used for this illustration.

Given that the writer does not, in fact, live in NYC, nor anywhere near it, not having much familiarity with its actual population is unsurprising.

Expand full comment

To which I would say: "one visit will dispell the confusion".

Expand full comment

I’ve been to NYC, I have a friend who grew up in NYC until he graduated high school(and he still visits family from time to time), it’s about as diverse as any large city in the south and he agrees.

I get you have your whole sense of pride, I have no idea why, but just visiting Austin I can see plenty of diversity, Vietnamese, Filipino, Korean, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Russian, Czech, English, Irish, German, whatever.

The whole point of this article is that some people would say 10 Asians from various countries isn’t as diverse as an Indian, Russian, Somalian, Mexican, and Japanese person, because the metric for “diversity” is so goofy and nonsensical.

Expand full comment

Does it really matter though if there are 500 members of some small ethnic group when most city residents are never going to interact with them if they don’t live in Queens? Especially when that ethnic group is really just a sub-group of some larger group?

How many New Yorkers can even tell the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese and Japanese, for example? We all know they’ve got different cuisines and different languages we don’t speak, but most non-Asians struggle to correctly guess which ethnic group an Asian person belongs to.

I think it’s easier to judge it by recognizable diversity. How many different major recognizable ethnicities are there that still speak a foreign language at home? Communities that speak dialects or that have fewer than a small town in population (5,000ish) don’t really count because they’re not a big cultural presence in a metro area with 18M people.

Ex: Italians, Germans, Irish, Norwegians, Swedes, etc all learned English and now you won’t find many of the descendants of those groups who speak the language of the old country. They’re all categorized as practitioners of white American culture.

Expand full comment

And when it comes to languages, where do you draw the line between distinct languages or just dialects?

I ask this mostly so I can cite the Weinreich witticism:

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

Expand full comment

I like that quote. Drawing the line would be like Dominicans and Puerto Ricans pretending there are significant cultural and linguistic differences between them.

Expand full comment

Thinking about Puerto Ricans reminds me of my sailboat racing days. One of the premiere invitational regattas for the Star Fleet was the Bacardi Cup. Old timers who had competed there many years would talk about the Bacardi family proclaiming the epic party they would throw when the communists were toppled and they could hold the regatta in Havana again.

I guess the Bacardi corporation is now headquartered in Bermuda, but they have significant roots in PR both from before the revolution and significantly strengthened when they were exiled and their holdings nationalized.

Expand full comment

New York City is the most culturally diverse. I grew up in New York, and I don’t think there’s a place on earth with as many cultures represented. This is obviously due to it being an immigration hub. Putting races into 3 or 4 camps doesn’t do justice to any metric of diversity. But that’s not what any of this is discussing.

Expand full comment

The whole concept is fuckery. Christ. And the constant talk! Shut up about your color already, we get it. 1/100 of the negro race was enslaved for few years in your great great great grandpas time. How about the Irish? The Chinese? Racist fucks need to go back to school.

Expand full comment

NYC is the closest to real diversity, which would be relatively even representation of a wide variety of groups.

We wouldn’t call Detroit “diverse”. It’s just a black city. The way salt lake is a Mormon city or Miami is a Latino city.

Expand full comment

Diversity of ethnicity, sure. Diversity of thought, however, is likely policed much more thoroughly.

https://argomend.substack.com/i/128911972/the-great-de-set

Expand full comment

'Diversity', however defined, as a goal, in and of itself was always a stupid, meaningless, if not destructive idea.

But in NYC's defense, surely there must be less homogenity in birthplace, language and culture amongst the daily assemblage of folks at a Brooklyn DMV than anywhere Georgia.

Expand full comment

The Economist wrote a similar article 20 ish years ago framing Norfolk, VA as the most racially diverse and NYC as the most segregated. Their methodology was to look at a block by block basis. What they found, which would be similar in DC and Philly, is that white people lived on blocks with 90+% white people. Blacks and Hispanics had some intermingling on their blocks but in general very similar. Norfolk being a military town didn’t have as many preferences available. Qa

Expand full comment

A place that has black and white people is less diverse than a place that has black, white, Asian and Hispanic people.

It's about the broad array of people.

Queens NY is definitely the most diverse place I've ever been.

Expand full comment