Our friend Jay Greene has an interesting review of Marjorie Rosen’s book “Boom Town” in The Wall Street Journal.  You can read it here.  Professor Greene takes on the book’s assertion that our community’s reaction to increasing diversity has been “cold stark fear—at least among a segment of the white Christian majority, which sees its comfortable, all-white way of life fading.”  He correctly asserts that business acts as an “engine of diversity,” and religion is a driver of acceptance, not discrimination.

(Ms. Rosen) finds that people of faith have an easy time understanding and accepting one another, including people who belong to different religious traditions, because they share a respect for religious belief. This type of tolerance is common in semi-rural northwest Arkansas but is not so common, one suspects, in the media and political centers that dot the coasts.

If Ms. Rosen had wanted to identify resistance from white, rural Christians to diverse newcomers, she should have distinguished between Arkansas’s politics and its business and social life. Businesses like Wal-Mart and Tyson are progressive engines of diversity because they will recruit and hire able workers of any color or religion. The only color they see is green. Social integration has gone smoothly because local residents, assisted by religiously backed norms of politeness, have been generally welcoming. Unlike business, politics is a zero-sum game. Good-old-boy politicians in Arkansas (or anywhere else) are more likely to think that if they share power with newly arrived groups, they will lose some of their own.

Professor Greene’s main thesis is summed up in this second paragraph.  He claims that while Arkansans are accepting in both business and social life, the opposite is true in politics.  “Politics is a zero-sum game”, meaning there is only so much political power, and Arkansas good-ole-boys aren’t likely to share theirs with newcomers anytime soon.

I would take this thesis a step further.  In addition to an entrenched good-ole-boy network, we have a group of political elites that feel they know best, and are willing to dictate to others what is best for them and their families.  We also have a populace that is too accepting of this arrangement.