{"id":370,"date":"2008-03-05T17:28:59","date_gmt":"2008-03-05T23:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=370"},"modified":"2008-03-05T17:28:59","modified_gmt":"2008-03-05T23:28:59","slug":"is-integration-always-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=370","title":{"rendered":"Is Integration Always Good?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>21\u00a0 bar rises 30.00\u00a01mh WSW windchill 19<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon<\/p>\n<p>Ethnonationalism may seem an antique or xenophobic topic, but this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.org\/20080301faessay87203\/jerry-z-muller\/us-and-them.html\">article in Foreign Affairs <\/a>suggests not.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Singapore made me scratch my head about an American article of faith segregation bad, integration good.\u00a0 Little India, Chinatown, Malaytown, Arab Street\u00a0and the old English quarters exist alongside each other with little apparent friction.\u00a0 Apparent is a key word because speaking to Singaporeans I found Malaya&#8217;s and Indians who talked about discrimination in the larger community. There&#8217;s also the matter of the undercover police that monitor Singaporean&#8217;s daily activity.<\/p>\n<p>White&#8217;s and Chinese have long been part of Singapore&#8217;s ruling elite so they tend not to have the same concerns.\u00a0 Even so, I noticed a vibrancy and a sense of cultural identity in the ethnically defined communities that I do not notice in similar communities in the US.\u00a0 Also, well after midnight, I saw women walking alone through relatively deserted city streets.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>To expand on experiences from the same trip the Thai people have a wonderful sense of identity and cultural assurance based on their long experience in the same geopolitical region;\u00a0likewise the Cambodians, though their situation has deep seated corruption and the legacy of the Pol Pot years that complicate their situation.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if all this\u00a0has any application in the US where our value of\u00a0 the melting pot has long history behind it.\u00a0 Even that history though has an ethnonationalistic twist.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Civil Rights law of 1964 opened immigration to countries outside western Europe, especially to\u00a0Asians who had been excluded since the days of the Yellow Peril.\u00a0 Until 1964 our immigration policies favored Anglo-Saxon countries.\u00a0 Then there was the 3\/4&#8217;s compromise and the resulting shame of\u00a0slavery for which we paid in blood and destruction.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Part of what made me think about this was recent material I&#8217;ve seen advocating\u00a0separate \u00a0classrooms, even schools, for boys and girls.\u00a0 Are we blind to some truths about human nature, or are we visionaries, a city on the hill, lighting the way for the rest of the world when it comes to a multicutural society?\u00a0 God, I don&#8217;t know, but this article made me think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>21\u00a0 bar rises 30.00\u00a01mh WSW windchill 19 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon Ethnonationalism may seem an antique or xenophobic topic, but this article in Foreign Affairs suggests not.\u00a0 Singapore made me scratch my head about an American article of faith segregation bad, integration good.\u00a0 Little India, Chinatown, Malaytown, Arab Street\u00a0and the old English &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/?p=370\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Is Integration Always Good?<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,266],"tags":[328,4353],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-world-history","tag-328","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}