Go play around with this clever interactive didacticism. It uses shapes and "shapism" as a parable for how slight racial preferences can lead to segregation and to a racist society. It's a nice little tale, and it fits in perfectly with the watchword of the day — diversity — but it has some assumptions that I am not entirely sure should be accepted without further consideration.
Mercifully, and to its credit, it does not assume that any bias on the part of individuals is "shapist". It merely asserts that even harmless biases on the individual level are nevertheless harmful in the aggregate. It purports to demonstrate this by showing how in a mixed society, even slight individual preferences lead statistically to shape-based separation. It's an interesting demonstration which generates a nice "Ah, I hadn't considered that, but now it seems so obvious" moment.
However, the parable problematically conflates voluntary group cohesion with segregation. Segregation is involuntary, forced separation - either de jure (think Nazism) or de facto (think Jim Crow South). Because it is involuntary, often violent, it is a grave and dehumanizing injustice and should never be tolerated. That is very different from people with the freedom to live where they want choosing to live among those like themselves.
Thus the parable assumes, and I am not convinced that it is a just assumption, that communities are the same as ghettos.
Further, the parable assumes that largely homogenous communities are inherently harmful. But the parable admits that this separation occurs even if no individual is racist, but only if they have a slight preference. So there is nothing inherently racist about homogenous communities.
So what is essentially wrong with it? That goes unanswered.
Many people have derived great personal value from the fact that they grew up in a particular racial community, that the values and history and culture and lived experience was shared among the people in the community and helped shape their identities as individuals. Many people are proud of their particular cultural heritage.
Indeed, I have often wished that I could have grown up in a day when in my hometown my own heritage, Irish Catholic, still cohered in a visible community. It seems to me that while it was not a perfect world, and while later generations have thankfully done a great deal in righting that age's wrongs, there was a good — being part of a community with a shared vision of the good life — that was lost.
The value of diversity is undeniable. Exposure to those who aren't like you is invaluable in understanding and appreciating both others and your own identity, and in stamping out racism. And the dangers of communities turning in on themselves, in seeing other communities as The Others, to be mistrusted, despised, or rejected, rather than as brothers in humanity to be loved and accepted — those dangers are very real.
But, if we insist on heterogeneity, on "diversity" as this parable envisions it, if we "settle for nothing less" and assume that anything less is inherently harmful, then there is no possibility for communities with genuine and valuable differences. Instead, we will live in a world where every person is isolated from those like himself; where no person has the opportunity to share his life with those who share his heritage.
Indeed, such heterogeneity, it seems to me, might eventually eradicate all differences between individuals of diverse backgrounds, leading not to diversity, but to beige sameness.
Hat Tip to The Loop.