This needs a citation. It's the sort of "common sense" all too often advanced by people with - frankly - racist or ethnonational agendas.
Jumping straight to claiming someone has a racist or ethnonational agenda because they didn't provide a citation seems uncharitable. It comes off as a worse form of sealioning. I'm not sure if you're trying to do that intentionally but I mention it so you can understand the hostility it may create.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007...
From Wikipedia on the study:
Harvard professor of political science Robert D. Putnam conducted a nearly decade long study on how diversity affects social trust. He surveyed 26,200 people in 40 American communities, finding that when the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, the more racially diverse a community is, the greater the loss of trust. People in diverse communities "don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," writes Putnam.
That said, there can both be problems and benefits of something, and in his research on diversity this is considered:
Putnam says, however, that "in the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits."
He asserted that his "extensive research and experience confirm the substantial benefits of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity, to our society."
It's not a race issue when this is experienced in Africa/Japan/Sweden/Finland.
Calling new idea to you racist is racist. Most of the times the word racist is used it is used incorrectly and often in a racist way.
There's a straight line between that argument - which again, almost always gets through around with out any kind of citations or research support - and ethnic cleansing. It's directly attached to racist ideas. Similar to social darwinism, it's something that seems like relatively harmless common sense on the surface, but leads to horrific implications when followed to its logical conclusion.
You just argue that people shouldn't acknowledge it because doing so would lead to policies you think would be immoral.
I'm just not sure that this anti-truth stance is tenable or really worth it. What if we can acknowledge the facts and then... handle them in a non-evil way?
Or perhaps even use that knowledge to head off terrible outcomes that might otherwise happen? E.g. Lebanon-style ethnic civil wars.
I generally think that knowing the truth is useful and equips you to do good things. You just need a non-childish moral system to integrate it (too easy to feel moral if you just wish away the hard facts of the universe).
So when I asked ChatGPT
> Are countries with less racial diversity more likely to have a larger safety net”
because my GoogleFu was failing me, of course it gave me a non controversial generic answer.
But when I asked it for citations it gave me this
> A 2018 study published in the journal Social Science Research, which found that countries with more ethnically diverse populations tend to have less generous welfare states.
Which led me to this link
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/37/1/89/5934740
> First, vignette experiments established a consistent and pervasive deservingness gap: welfare recipients belonging to the ethnic ingroup are more likely to be considered deserving of welfare support than the ethnic outgroup
In most countries that are ethnically diverse, that diversity was created through various forms of colonialism. Often with racial imperialism deeply ingrained in it. Which means those countries have long running strains of racist ideas and ideologies that forms the foundations of the ethnic "in group" and "out group".
Which is not to say that ethnic strife doesn't exist in non-colonial countries as well, but that this line of thinking and examination is a) extremely complex, b) inextricable from the history of the systems under examination, c) inextricable from deep histories of racist thought - often imposed by colonnial or imperialist powers, and d) similar to social darwinism in that it is often presented as common sense, but leads to some very dark places when taken, unexamined, to its logical conclusion.
You do raise a fair point
