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The Demise
of Ethnic Differences—Cultural Identity and the Internet
By Caleb Rosado, Ph.D.
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Summary: The Internet allows us to transcend
traditional approaches to human identity, which focus on superficial issues such as race,
ethnicity, and gender, and instead focus on ideas and shared values.
he Internet is shaping up to be the greatest engine of
social change since the military conquest of nations. What is now up for grabs, however,
is not geographical territory but the area of the mind. In this battle for the
"mindscape" the stakes are high, because more important than external, physical
space as the booty, is the internal universe of the human mind and spirit. This is the new
enticing prize of possession, with all its thinking, beliefs, and value systems that
eventually shape the external world around us. This assault on the mind is coming rapidly,
at the rate of nanoseconds, yet it is so subtle that most people are not even aware of the
dynamics taking place. No blood is being let, no visible armies are storming the gates, no
usual array of smart weapons are being fired. Yet, an invisible army of ideas is storming
the "gates of the mind," while a most unusual array of "smart weapons"
is being fired at our prefrontal lobes, our centers of judgment, reasoning, and
decision-making. They are re-wiring the brain, re-focusing the thinking, and re-creating
new pathways and directions for human conduct. The new warriors are memes—contagious
ideas that self-replicate from mind to mind. They will so alter the landscape of human
minds with such a domino effect, that it will make the old territorial battles for
geography seem like child’s play. Why fight from without, when you can conquer from
within?
Now this discussion could go a thousand ways from
here. The list of issues that can take over this conversation is endless. Morals,
education, cyber terrorism, brain wiring, religion, human evolution, ethics, mind control,
artificial intelligence, memetics, privacy, cloning, human development, are all merely
discussion starters. The one area where I want to focus, and where the Internet is going
to re-landscape our nation and the world, is in the area of ethnic and cultural identity.
A Borderless World
Traditional approaches to human identity have focused on external issues of a biological,
cultural, gender, or socioeconomic nature. Those who continue to categorize people on such
a superficial basis from a victim-oriented mode of thinking may well be blind-sided by the
challenges and changes that are already looming on the horizon when it comes to the
Internet and ethnic/racial/cultural/gender identity. These identities are socially
constructed and are not part of our biological makeup. They all played a key and vital
role in the 19th and 20th century social movements from Civil
Constraint—focused on Slavery, to Civil War—focused on Freedom, to Civil
Rights—focused on Equality. And yet the slavery-to-equality range of issues is as far
as most conversations, committees, and commissions on race have gotten. The result has
been a massive struggle for human rights and privileges, most of it to be lauded. In some
case, however, the medicine has been worse than the disease. The backlash against
multiculturalism and affirmative action, which has now moved to a campaign against ethnic
studies programs in university campuses, has been in some cases an attempt to provide a
corrective to extreme policies of political correctness. Yet, in other situations, it has
been an all-out war of annihilation of effective programs. What we now need in this new
millennium is not just more discussions of this 20th century agenda, but a move
to a new level of operation, a fourth social movement to get us heading in a healthy,
holistic direction. Colleague Don Beck sees this as a shift to Civil
Transformation—focused on Mutuality and Living Wholeness (unity-in-diversity) within
a global economy with mutual interdependence.
What will make this shift possible is the
Internet. The Internet is not only bringing about incredible technological changes, but is
also altering the way people see themselves and the way the human mind works. In ages
past, where national and group boundaries were important for socioeconomic, religious,
ethnic, and political reasons, identity with your own group, culture, and nation was
vital. Passports were essential for proving who you were, for entry, and for residence.
Today, the Internet has not just created fluidity across traditional boundaries; in many
situations it is actually obliterating them. I do not need my passport to cyber-travel to
the UK and access the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. After writing the previous
sentence I stopped and immediately traveled online to Oxford to access their main library
to make sure that I had the correct spelling—I had missed the "i"—all
within 50 seconds. No passport, no Concorde, no getting out of bed where I was doing my
writing. In a previous time period I would not even have gotten through the door at Oxford
due to color, class, culture, and country differences. Now all that is in the past. I went
in and out in a matter of seconds and no one knew the difference for none of those
differences mattered. This is a small example of how the Internet is moving society toward
a borderless world where all the old socially constructed boundaries are increasingly
becoming irrelevant.
The new variables that connect and divide people
are their systems of values, their interests, the limits they set on their thinking and
possibilities, and the new networks they forge with others who share the same interests
and concerns in the cyber-world of the World Wide Web. On the Internet one does not know
with whom one is communicating (whether they are Black or White, from Sweden or from
Africa, a 9 year-old computer wizard or a Nobel laureate, is mono or multilingual, a
lesbian or a homophobe, an atheist or a Buddhist, the variables are endless). What matters
in the WWW are not these old visible boundaries, which in the past pre-empted people from
entering or expressing their ideas even before they could open their mouths due to the
mental scripts and wiring of the brain of those who were the gatekeepers of power. The
Internet eliminates such 20th century superficial factors by creating a new
"affirmative action" program where all, irrespective of who or what they are,
have equal access as long as they can cross the digital divide and "get themselves
connected." This is what matters now—connectedness. Such are the changes the
Internet is making—out with one hundred-year wars and in with networks of shared
values and systems of thinking.
Celebrating Diversity or Living Wholeness?
Two other factors, associated with the Internet, are also influencing new identities. The
new "multiracial" category of the 2000 US Census with which nearly 7 million
people identified is also watering down ethnic/racial/cultural identities, eventually to
the point where such differences will matter very little. Latinos, for example, have been
a multiracial people ever since Columbus landed and began to miscegenate with the
indigenous populations. And there are very few Blacks in the US who can honestly claim to
be 100% African.
The Human Genome Project, with the data readily
available on the Internet, is the other factor that is redefining who we are as human
beings. The data show that all human beings have only some 30,000 genes, and every person
on Earth shares 99.9% of that same genetic code with all other people. Such findings
demand that the focus must shift from superficial issues of race, color, and ethnic
divides to the deeper levels of operational value systems within people. This is the
developmental spiral of thinking systems that generate the intolerance toward the
one-tenth of 1% of human differences, and are the source of much global conflict over such
minimal diversity. Yet, as Don Beck says, "human diversity at the deep levels of
cultural values and thinking systems may be the greatest and most empowering diversity
of all, for these determine how people think, not just what they say, value, or
do." This is why the focus must shift from dermal to cranial.
These two factors are now challenging the very
foundations of diversity training on the one hand, and human social identity on the other.
We have moved through various stages or levels of human relations development: from
affirmative action in the 1960s and 1970s, to valuing diversity in the 1980s, to managing
diversity in the 1990s. The focus of much of these efforts has been on multiculturalism
and celebrating differences in the workplace, the school, the church, the community, the
nation, and the world. Most of these efforts have been laudable, for they have immediately
brought greater understanding, sensitive, and appreciation of human differences. Yet,
"celebrating differences" cannot be the ultimate goal or final stage of human
relations endeavors. If such is their end, in the long run these efforts—as good as
they appear to be—end up promoting racial/ethnic/gender divides that further
alienate, fragment, and frustrate our social well-being. Focusing on what differentiates
people at the expense of what they have in common does not further the cause and efforts
for unity. This is why much of what passes for diversity training ultimately does not
work, and its successes and accomplishments have been few and often short-lived. The
reason is that the focus has not only been on surface level matters, but more importantly,
on what distinguishes people rather than on what they collectively share as human beings
whereby to create healthy societal/group wholeness. Yet, successful human relations
efforts must not only address factors that make people distinctive, but even more so, what
they share that makes them similar. This is where the colorful spiral of emergent,
unfolding behavior systems that shape human conduct and the way people see the world comes
in. For from these differing value systems emerge, not only intolerance and discrimination
among some, but also compassion and acceptance of human differences and the factors that
create for unity and human connectedness among others. To focus on the one-tenth of 1% of
human differences, and not on these deep decision-making systems, is to focus on the gnat
on an elephant’s back and miss the whole elephant.
In the "unity-in-diversity" continuum,
the focus cannot be one-sided, but balanced. The key dynamic in diversity management is to
maintain the two dimensions of unity and diversity in balanced tension, without erring to
either side. Erring on the side of unity results in uniformity and sameness at the expense
of our human uniqueness and distinctiveness. Erring on the side of diversity magnifies
differences and separation at the expense of our common, shared humanity. Unity is not
synonymous with uniformity, neither is diversity synonymous with separation. The solution
to the tension is to respect and value diversity while working for unity and wholeness,
otherwise exclusion is the result. Thus, the strength of a nation or organization lies in
Living Wholeness—the balancing of the two elements of unity-in-diversity through the
valuing of wholes and parts.
Living Wholeness is a way of life that brings
together the diverse strands of the human social fabric in a manner that transcends and
includes, by weaving them into a holistic spiral of interdependent elements. It is
lifestyle unique to the 21st century, for never before in human history have so
many different cultures and ethnic groups, with differing systems of thinking and
"mindware," come together in the major urban centers of the world to form some
semblance of social existence and convivialness.
The Internet Generation
In terms of human social identity, a new generation with a new identity is
emerging—the Internet Generation—that does not even remember the Civil Rights
Movement and segregated living, one that operates at another level of human existence,
acceptance, and thinking, with a different set of operational values. They do not share
the same interest in their Blackness, their Chicanismo, their being a
"model-minority" or whatever other social labels others who may "look like
them" and have so identified themselves in the past, may want to hang on them.
William F. Ogburn in 1932 addressed such tensions brought about by social change by
showing how the material aspects of culture [in terms of this discussion, the Internet]
change faster than the non-material aspects can keep up with [our value systems, the way
our brains are presently wired]. He called these periods "cultural lags," and
the result can be severe internal conflict, both in the person and in the nation. The
present national reality, oriented toward ethnic/cultural identity and flying in the face
of the changes the Internet is bringing, is an example of such "cultural lag"
and the psycho-social warfare it creates over culturally constructed differences.
This does not mean, of course, that the old
paradigm of ethnic and cultural identity will soon disappear, for it won’t. Ethnic
wars will still rage and cultural differences will continue to dominate racial discourse
in great measure due to the values people uphold or are fighting off, and the
self-interests they desire to protect and garner for themselves. The recent racial/ethnic
riots throughout England make this clear that ethnic self-interests are not going to go
away soon. Yet focusing on outward differences between groups, rather than on thinking
systems, as much diversity and race relations training tends to do, will do nothing to
ameliorate the situation. Thus, among some groups, depending on their level of operation
in the spiral of human development, racial and ethnic identity will intensify due to
worsening conditions. For others at other levels of existence it will simply disappear as
other factors take on greater importance. For many this is the core question "Who am
I?" as a human being, beyond being Black, Brown, White, Jewish, Arab, Irish,
Buddhist, Christian or whatever other socio-cultural labels we may identify with. These
labels reflect the objective "Me" (the way I and others perceive me), but not
the subjective "I" (the essence of who I am as a human being beyond societal
impositions). It is in the "I" where our similarities as humans are found and
where systems of change must focus. But we tend to be concerned with the "Me"
and with all its self-enhancing entitlements with which we dress and prop up our otherwise
fragile egos and dishonest behaviors.
The changes awaiting us in the near future will
force us out of our heads and into our hearts with rigorous honesty, as we come to grips
with the essence of our common core humanity, which we tend to deny or hide behind
cultural armor and image-enhancing facades of racial, ethnic, and gender identities. Even
the virtual identities and e-consciousness the Internet is creating can become a new
source of conflict if we forget that as humans we have more in common with what unites us
than with what divides us. Yet, it was José Ortega y Gasset who reminded us that such
attempts to hang on to "nationalism" in the face of inevitable change for
inclusiveness represent the "last flare," the "last sigh," which are
often "the longest" and "the deepest." And these tend to intensify
"on the very eve of their disappearance." However, whether there will be an
intensifying for some and inclusiveness for others depends on the deep-level value systems
at which people operate, the forces of change they are addressing, and how open they are
to theses changes.
This new Internet Generation will be more
impacted by their global cyber culture and individual achievements than by past
bio-psycho-social-spiritual factors that forged the identity of their parents. Tiger
Woods, with his "cablinasian" identity is just one example. Any understanding of
diversity in this new millennium needs to consider these factors and how the new culture
of the Internet will shape a whole new "cultural" identity that transcends the
old bio-cultural ones. The key factor here is what lies behind this new identity. It is
not the old ideas of the color of people, but the color in people—
i.e., the colorful memetic systems of thinking and the resulting behaviors these
produce—which have always generated most of the conflict.
In this Third Millennium, the looming
socio-technological changes birthed by the Internet will use the human mind as a host for
self-replication. These memes will bring about a global transformational shift from
equality and fighting for "rights," to mutuality and living wholeness that will
value inclusiveness and human interconnectedness.
Welcome to the Future!
About the Author
Dr. Caleb Rosado is
Director of El Centro, the extension campus of Northeastern Illinois University in
Chicago. He is a sociologist, an inspirational motivational speaker, educator,
facilitator, and consultant. His passion, talents, and inspiring teaching skills add value
to leaders interested in reducing prejudice, eliminating discrimination, understanding
human relations, and aligning human structural systems. He has provided diversity and
multicultural training to corporate team leaders, educators, members of the clergy, and
police officers throughout the U.S.A., Europe, Asia and Latin America. Dr. Rosado is a
standing ovation quality speaker who draws inspiration for his practical recommendations
on how to deal with the urgent challenges of our time. Dr. Rosado is spiritually grounded,
a veteran workshop and seminar leader, and a family man with strong inclusive values, who
makes mission and business sense to managers and leaders eager to reduce prejudice in the
workplace. Dr. Rosado holds a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University, has
published three books plus numerous professional articles, and has taught at several
universities. He brings a unique approach to diversity training. It is a value systems
approach which enables people to understand the thinking systems from which emerge much of
the conflict between groups in the world today, as well as the solutions to global
racial/ethnic/gender divides. This 21st century approach enables participants to
understand the factors that create for unity and human connectedness in this new
millennium. E-mail: calebrosado@earthlink.net Website:
www.rosado.net
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