2/This book is not very "pop". It's a dry political science book that's basically a concatenation of several research papers, all based on one big survey that was done in 2004.https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/RCMD/studies/27601 …
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13/After establishing these basic facts, the book correlated different conceptions of Americanism, and different self-identities, with various policy preferences and with perceptions of discrimination. This approach has at least two big methodological problems...
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14/The first problem is that since such large majorities of people agree on what it means to be an American, there isn't much variation in the data. The second problem, of course, is telling correlation from causation. This is just a survey.
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15/But a few interesting facts really jump out. For both Latinos and Asians, national-origin identity disappears across the generations, and American identity increases.pic.twitter.com/dKukI7jgoE
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16/Note, though, that for Latinos, racial ("pan-ethnic") identity also declines, while for Asians it does not.pic.twitter.com/Z1arx2jJTe
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17/Next, for both Latinos and Asians, the more people experience individual-level racial discrimination, the more they tend to identify with their racial and/or national-origin group rather than with America.pic.twitter.com/fYMZsX0e3e
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18/Now, there's an obvious correlation/causation problem here, namely that people who identify more strongly with their racial group might also be the type of people more likely to feel they're being discriminated against...
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19/BUT, interestingly, there's not much correlation between Latinos' and Asians' identity and their perceptions that their racial GROUP is discriminated against in America. It's only INDIVIDUAL-level discrimination that correlates with feeling less American.
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20/This suggests that individual racial discrimination is the biggest danger for national unity in the face of large-scale immigration. In other words, we need less of this crap:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhZEPmchxCU …
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21/We need absolutely ZERO of this crap:http://fortune.com/2017/03/22/when-americans-tell-americans-go-back-to-your-country/ …
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22/Not even a little bit of this crap!!!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mOqoklLyM0 …
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23/The data in "Americanism in the Twenty-First Century" strongly implies that if it weren't for asshole racists giving nonwhite Americans a hard time, we would have national unity.
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24/Even WITH racists running around being assholes, most Americans of all races feel American, and we still all have broad agreement on what it means to be an American (at least, as of 2004). But, we can do better.
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25/If you see a racist giving someone a hard time or yelling "Get out of my country" or some such bullshit, shut them down immediately. For the sake of common human decency, but also for the sake of the country. (end)
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End of conversation
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