diversity Archives - Contra Mundum

September 19, 2025September 19, 2025

Does Diversity Require the Policing of Speech? Reflections on the State of America’s Integrationist Nationalism

“Mistrust” (Photo by Christopher Cotrell)

Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia

So pervasive is the integrationist logic of post-civil rights America that it’s sometimes instructive–if not a little jarring–to talk to minorities abroad who could not imagine abiding by its rules.

To that end, I conducted an interview with a thirty-something ethnic Chinese professional to get her perspective on interethnic relations in this thriving multicultural East Javanese port city of 3 million inhabitants. Surabaya is the second largest city in Indonesia, which, with almost 300 ethnicities, is one of the most diverse countries in the world. While the level of ethnic mixing varies across the country, the overall intermarriage rate is low. A 2020 study found that almost 90% of Indonesians marry within their ethnic group. The ethnic Chinese are thought to be the least likely to outmarry.¹

Given the sensitivity of the topic and the recent political turmoil, my interviewee asked that I not publish her name. We talked over a poolside table at a luxury hotel, where I had thought she could speak honestly about her experiences as an ethnic Chinese Indonesian.

Although there were few people around, my interlocutor still looked around to make sure that no ethnic Javanese hotel guests or hotel workers could overhear her. She’d occasionally break into a whisper. Once, when asked what her parents had taught her to think of the Javanese, she refused to cite specifics. I then nudged her to tell me just two things they had said. She obliged. Just two. I can only assume that she thought that whatever else her parents had said would either have reflected poorly on them or have been just too insulting to the Javanese.

Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are widely known to enjoy a higher economic status than other ethnicities in Indonesia. They are what author Amy Chua has called “market-dominant minorities,” ethnic groups “who for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the ‘indigenous’ majorities around them.”²

The resentment this economic imbalance inevitably creates has periodically erupted in anti-Chinese scapegoating and even violence. In 1998, during the Asian financial crisis, some indigenous Indonesians blamed the ethnic Chinese minority for the nation’s economic plight. This sparked two days of large-scale rioting in Jakarta in which Chinese-owned businesses were looted and burned and dozens of Chinese Indonesian women were raped.

That level of violence pushed some wealthy Chinese Indonesians to emigrate to Singapore, but it also ultimately led to the collapse of President Suharto’s authoritarian regime, a watershed moment that has since led to growing democratization and acceptance of ethnic pluralism in Indonesia.

***

Under Suharto’s 32 year rule, the government’s cultural policy was stridently assimilationist. Although “Unity in Diversity” was the national motto, government policy promoted cultural homogenization. In August of 1967, Suharto called for the complete assimilation of Indonesians of foreign heritage. Ethnic Chinese were pressured to assume Indonesian names and abandon Chinese customs. Chinese-language newspapers were banned with the exception of one that was published by the government. While private Chinese groups could still establish schools, Chinese-language instruction was prohibited. Enforcement of assimilation laws was uneven and sometimes nonexistent, but the message was clear. Under Suharto, Chinese Indonesians developed multiple strategies to obscure their distinctiveness while preserving their networks.

All that changed when the regime collapsed in 1998. Decentralization and democratization allowed both ethnic and regional identities to reemerge. After more than a generation of restrictions, “Chinese Indonesians were now allowed to publicly display their religions, beliefs and customs and to start civil rights groups to reassess their position in society.”³ Of course, the new openness also enabled greater public expression of simmering ethnic tensions.

If my interlocutor’s story suggests anything beyond the anecdotal, it’s that the ethnic Chinese residents of Surabaya are eager to remain separate yet not necessarily very traditionally Chinese. I recount our conversation mostly because I think it sheds light on the very different ways Americans perceive and manage ethnic difference.

***

In both the governmental and the cultural spheres, diversity is generally celebrated as a positive social benefit in the United States, At the same time, anti-discrimination laws combined with strong contemporary social dictates on what is acceptable to say or discuss make many Americans reluctant to speak openly about ethnic and racial differences. So, ironically, what is presented in the abstract as an overall social good is also seen as a minefield that’s best to avoid.

The civil rights era push for racial integration also had the ancillary effect of encouraging ethnic assimilation. Starting with the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, which, as historian Anders Walker has written, “rested on the unsupportable assumption that black history, black traditions, and black institutions were inferior and should be destroyed, erased in favor of assimilating blacks into mainstream white America” had a profound effect on how Americans viewed the integration of all non-white groups.⁴ While diversity in America–as in all multiethnic nations–was always challenging, a desire to remain separate from the Anglo-centric mainstream was now viewed by both conservatives and liberals as being contrary to the judicially-sanctioned national drive to a harmonious future.

Ethnicity, which was once understood to be a more or less inevitable, if unfortunate, part of being an immigrant nation, came to be seen as a vestigial remnant of a primordial past, one characterized by ancient grudges, irrational loyalties, and primitive religious rituals and beliefs. The new integrationist nationalism now saw the embrace of ethnic identities as old-fashioned tribalism, which ran counter to the modern goal of national unity.

By the early 1970s, however, evolving anti-discrimination law and the advent of affirmative action–or positive discrimination as the British call it–incentivized the claiming of minority identities. Ethnic pressure groups lobbied the government to be granted protected status on the grounds that they had collectively suffered historic discrimination. Gaining protected status ensured that their co-ethnics benefitted from anti-discrimination laws and strategic advantages in college admissions and job applications.

This new regimen did not replace integrationist nationalism. It lived uncomfortably alongside it. While integrationism pushed assimilation, the civil rights regime encouraged continued ethnic identification. These conflicting regimes forged a new dynamic in which, in order to implement the new civil rights policies, government bureaucracies began to categorize members of specific national origin groups into larger administratively-convenient aggregate categories. Just as early modern governments in Europe once impose standardized weights and measurements on distant villages that had long since developed their own varied techniques, the U.S. government imposed new groupings in order to better keep track of the nation’s population.

What this meant was that growing numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin American were now funneled into a new system in which, upon arrival, they were now categorized not as, say, Chinese or Korean, but as “Asian” and then assessed as to whether they could be designated as “protected minorities,”

The conflict between the ideologies of integrationism and minority protection forged a new type of assimilation, one that encouraged the children and grandchildren of immigrants to abandon the premodern elements of their heritage while remaining identified with one of the government-created categories. A Mexican Catholic, for instance, would transform into a “Hispanic,” with all the warmth, history, texture, and ancient religious customs that this cold bureaucratic term implies. The post civil rights American ethnic, in other words, was encouraged to drop the specific texture of their heritages while remaining vaguely distinctive from the majority. They were expected to strip themselves of ancient roots while integrating into a deracinated, aggregate “ethnic” category. In short, foreign-born parents could remain Korean while their children were transformed into “Asian Americans.”

The one exception to this rule was reserved for indigenous peoples largely because progressive whites saw their primordial identities as a powerful symbolic challenge to the prevailing norms of “western civilization.” Whereas Catholicism, for example, was viewed part and parcel of an oppressive western order, ancient indigenous beliefs were seen as fundamentally innocent, a quality many late 20th century American whites began to crave for themselves.

In any case, by the late 20th century, genuine cultural pluralism, the acceptance–however grudgingly or even racist–that all groups did not act, believe, or see the world the same as one another had given way to a conflicted ideology of national unity/homogeneity wrapped in faux, officially-sanctioned diversity. At the same time, Americans received constant warnings to watch what they said and did around protected minorities–or at least those with powerful allies–because any missteps might land them in a heap of trouble.

***

My interlocutor, I’ll call her Angela, is a third-generation Chinese Indonesia. Her grandparents were born in the Fujian Province in southeastern China and mostly spoke Hokkien. The street she grew up on was entirely Chinese. She estimates that her childhood neighborhood was maybe 90% Chinese. She attended all Chinese schools but the instruction was in Bahasa Indonesia, a standardized version of Malay, which was once the language of a tiny minority that for political and linguistic reasons was chosen to be the country’s official language upon independence in 1945. (Not entirely unlike Standard High German, Bahasa Indonesia was made the official national language in an effort to unify a nation of many tongues). Every single one of her friends is Chinese. She dated only Chinese men and eventually married one.

Thanks to a class she took for a summer in China, she speaks a little Mandarin, but not very well. Still, she says, the Chinese business people who come to Surabaya consider her fully Chinese. And, with China’s growing commercial presence in the region—it is, by far, Indonesia’s largest trading partner—that’s a big advantage.

When she was a little girl, Angela’s parents made it clear that the Javanese were not like her. Not only were they not at their same “cultural level,” but when they got paid they just frittered away their money. “They don’t know how to save,” she said in a concerned tone. She wouldn’t tell me what else her parents told her.

Other than language, the biggest difference Angela saw between herself and her parents and grandparents was religion. A few years ago, she said she began to question why her elders “worshipped their ancestors rather than God.” She converted to Catholicism not long after. While Christian missionaries had been proselytizing the Chinese in Indonesia since at least the 19th century, the number of conversions exploded under the Suharto regime. Some converted as a way of obscuring their ethnicity, their way of complying with the national policy of assimilation. Conversion was “not a matter of what they believed,” writes sociologist Andreas Susanto, “but what they perceived was safe.” So why not convert to Islam, the majority religion? It may have been a reflection of their “reluctance to assimilate into the indigenous society,” of keeping “their distance” from the Indonesian majority.⁵ Converting to Christianity also gave Chinese Indonesians a sense of belonging to a global network. Today, almost half are either Protestant or Catholic.

But Angela isn’t living under a coercive assimilationist policy, and other than her apparent disdain for what she called “ancestor worship,” I didn’t get a full grasp of why she converted. It’s quite possible that she did so religious reasons, that she was looking for some meaning in her life. Still, her parish is 60 to 70% Chinese, but the rest are mostly from migrants from outlying Nusa Tenggara and Madura islands. It’s the first time she has ever chosen to be in an ethnically-mixed private setting. She said she enjoyed it.

Without language and religion, it’s not entirely clear what Chineseness means to Angela other than the networks, attitudes, and behaviors that make for success in a global marketplace.

Before we said our goodbyes, we discussed the ethnic tensions that still exist between the Chinese and Javanese. We talked about the growing upward mobility among the Javanese. I asked her whether that was a good thing, thinking that perhaps Javanese economic success could undercut some of the jealousy and resentment some had felt for the Chinese. She disagreed. She didn’t like the trend. She said, “It just means there’s less for us Chinese.”

***

I have no idea whether Angela’s opinions are reflective of Chinese Indonesians at large. All I can say is that her honesty rattled me. It bothered me. I wasn’t used to it.

Sure, I’ve heard Americans utter all sorts of raw things on racial and ethnic matters over the years, but rarely so openly, and never to a complete stranger with a notebook in his hand. It made me wonder how much of America’s post-civil rights era “unity in diversity” regime has been based on the policing of speech, whether free intellectual–and cultural–expression had been among the costs of America’s much celebrated diversity. I wonder whether the price of social peace means we actually have little idea what Americans are thinking when no one is around. And, if so, can that really be considered peace?

Raka Ibrahim, “Marrying into Chinese-Indonesian Families: Stories of Interethnic Relationships,” The Jakarta Post, January 31, 2022. https://www.thejakartapost.com/culture/2022/01/30/marrying-into-chinese-indonesian-families-stories-of-interethnic-relationships.html. ↩︎
Amy Chua, World on Fire : How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 6. ↩︎
Marleen Dieleman et al., “Chinese Indonesians and the Regime Change: Alternative Perspectives,” in Chinese Indonesians and Regime Change, ed. Marleen Dieleman, Juliette Koning, and Peter Post, (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), 3. ↩︎
Anders Walker, The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 232-233. ↩︎
Andreas Susanto, “Diversity in Compliance: Yogyakarta Chinese and the New Order Assimilation Policy,” in Chinese Indonesians and Regime Change, ed Marleen Dieleman, Juliette Koning, and Peter Post, (Leiden/Boston, 2011), 80-81. ↩︎

December 3, 2022February 2, 2023

Inclusion, Mistrust, and the Problem with Putting the Roof on First

The other day, I stumbled across an interesting essay in Christianity Today about what the collapse of membership in evangelical churches might mean for politics in the American South. The upshot was that it might not mean as much you’d think. But what was most interesting in the analysis was how the author, Daniel K. Williams, an historian who studies the intersection of religion and politics, challenged the prevailing notion that secularization—or, more accurately, dechurching—transforms people into hyper-rational high modernists. Sure, there are a fair number of intellectual types who reject the religion they’d formerly practiced and become strict devotees of the Enlightenment, but most people who become alienated from their faiths generally don’t reinvent their world views from top to bottom.

I usually cringe when I read anything about religion in the non-religious American press. More often than not, journalists treat faith as if it were first and foremost a set of “beliefs,” not appreciating that the average church goer generally isn’t willing to throw down over the fine points of theology and dogma. When citizens of modern liberal democracies choose to worship in formal religious venues, it’s because it provides them with a source of solace and wisdom when confronting the trials and tribulations of life and helps orient them toward answers to the most difficult questions, particularly those surrounding death and the hell that is other people. Of course, the fine points of theology–and liturgy–are not insignificant. They’re what make someone feel part of one denomination as opposed to another. But sociologically and politically speaking, what’s most important in any religion is the Weltanschauung, the comprehensive conception of the world and the place of humans with in it, that it provides followers. Any given theology serves to undergird this overall understanding of the world, notions about the meaning of life and what attitudes and behaviors best help you survive it. This general “moral orientation,” as Williams calls it, can live on even after people leave their churches, “even if it survives only in a distorted form.”

This explains why the political views of lapsed Catholics in the Northeast are still generally liberal. They still retain the “theology of communal beliefs” of the Church they left behind. In the same way, Williams argues, lapsed Southern evangelicals are not likely to suddenly become political liberals but instead will retain the “individualistic moralism” that defines–and even predates–evangelicalism in the South.

At this point, then, we’re not talking about articulated beliefs in the supernatural but more implicit assumptions about the nature of reality. An unchurched American who was raised by Baptists from Oklahoma is likely to have different assumptions about what humans owe one another or how they should generally behave than does a child of lapsed Catholics–or even mainline Protestants–from Texas. The worldview that may have once been instilled by religion becomes a more secular lens through which an individual views his fellow humans.

After mining survey data to compare the political views of churched and unchurched evangelicals, Williams hits pay dirt. The biggest contrast between the two groups came in the “area of personal trust in other people.” When asked, “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance or would they try to be fair?” 54% of white Protestant Southerners who attended church no more than once a year said that most people would try to take advantage of them. The response to the same question by Southern Protestants who attend church every week was almost the opposite. Fully 62% percent said that most people would “try to be fair” and not take advantage of them.

Similarly, when asked “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?”, 58% of the once-a-year church goers chose the cynical answer. Again, the responses of weekly church goers were almost the opposite. 57% said that most of the time people “try to be helpful.” Stripped of any religiously inspired notions of divine or human grace, unchurched evangelicals were left with what Williams calls “a deeply suspicious individualism.”

This makes me wonder whether West Coast-variety secular progressivism—with its decidedly elevated focus on racial and gender discrimination—also elicits a similar kind of mistrust in people. Neo-Civil Rights social campaigns highlighting the need to take care when conducting cross-racial or cross-gender relationships can certainly make people properly conscientious about how they treat others who are unlike them. However, it’s conceivable that they can also instill mistrust. Particularly in an era in which minorities and women are encouraged to complain about any real or perceived mistreatment, I wonder if such a social climate could also make people more likely to assume—to paraphrase the aforementioned survey question—that most people unlike them would try to take advantage of them rather than be fair. It reminds me of the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen’s character calls a television executive an antisemite because, Allen insists, the exec asked him, “Jew eat lunch?” rather than “Did you eat lunch?” Allen’s character’s paranoia, of course, has clear historical origins. And the scene is poignant in addition to being funny, because even if this executive wasn’t an antisemite, it doesn’t mean that others might not be. And when do you trust people and when is it right to assume the worst? In any case, it’s fair to ask whether secular progressivism is spreading a “deeply suspicious communalism,” not entirely unlike the cynicism Williams found metastasizing in the South.

***

I’ve been reading a lot about the ideological mishmash that animated America’s founders, namely liberalism, republicanism, and the brand of Christianity and Deism that were clearly part of the mix. Despite historians’ best efforts to cast the American Revolution as some sort of intellectually-driven movement, there was not a single ideological through line that united the patriots or the framers. The Constitutional Convention itself was more a series of hard-won compromises over competing interests than it was some sort of intellectual debate about what constituted the best form of government.

I love that the delegates are called Framers. I realize it’s because they framed—or shaped—the Constitution, but what fascinates me is how much the Constitution itself was a frame to a nation that had not yet been born in any substantive sense. Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Continental Congress, called the Constitution a “new roof” that unified citizens of diverse and divided states. It’s significant that he saw it as a roof rather than a foundation. Nonetheless, that roof, according to the late Princeton historian John M. Murrin, “an ingenious contrivance” that gave a fragile, embryonic American national identity, a generation or two for interstate economic links to begin to tie together a real national community.

More than a half century later, Abraham Lincoln characterized the Constitution, which was a largely amoral set of procedural rules, as a picture frame designed to enhance the beauty of a work of art. Lincoln believed that the Declaration of Independence, which stated that all men are created equal, was the “primary cause of our great prosperity.” It was the “great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest.” As such, the Constitution could only be understood in tandem with the Declaration. Borrowing the biblical image of a “apple of a gold in a silver picture,” he compared the Constitution to “the picture of silver, subsequently framed around” the Declaration. “The picture,” he wrote, “was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—the apple not for the picture.”

Of course, the Declaration of Independence was a piece of war propaganda written to justify an act of secession and garner both domestic and international support. But that’s another story altogether. The point here is that the brilliant men who created the Constitution created a federal government but not a nation or a shared culture, which had to emerge through ongoing cooperation and conflict among the country’s inhabitants themselves.

I say inhabitants, because citizenship—along with its attendant rights—was defined legally and did not include all inhabitants. We all know the great trope of American civic life, that the Revolution is a work in progress, that the circle of citizenship widens through struggle over time. But citizenship is not the same as culture, and sharing a sense of national fate is not the same as sharing a worldview about the meaning and purpose of life.

That’s one of the many weaknesses of the current focus on social inclusion. Not only does it assume that there is a single culture into which everyone wants to be included, but that that single culture has already been pre-made by someone else before you were invited to participate. At the very least, you’d think that in the name of democracy, all Americans should be encouraged to inquire what exactly they’re being asked to include themselves in and whether there’s an escape hatch. Or at least an edit button.

More than 230 years after the Constitution was ratified, America still hasn’t congealed into a single culture. And while that fact can, at times, be a recipe for friction—political and otherwise—it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, if you really believe in diversity, as so many Americans claim to these days, you should really hope that the inhabitants of this enormous nation never allow themselves to be compelled to living in one single homogeneous culture. It seems to me that the only way to lower the unhealthy levels of social mistrust in contemporary America is not to try to shove everybody into one box, but in learning to accept that some people will never see the world like you do.