Segregated Populations

Full Title or Meme

Segregation has focused on explicit laws that enforce differences on different peoples based on their identity. Here the focus is on their lack of identifiers.

Context

For this paper we consider any kind of segregation that take place in a society and the impact that has on the segregated part that is less well off; examples include:

• The Roma in Bulgaria
• The Travelers in Ireland
• Itinerant farmworkers that move into each area where food is being harvested
• The Indigenous people in Vancouver BC where police have been called when they applied for bank accounts
• The Uighurs in China where forced assimilation is underway today
• The Chinese in New York, in this case we look back a few years to when Chinatown was at its peak
• The homeless in Seattle where an attempt to make homelessness a crime nearly succeeded
• The poor communities in Los Angeles, Watts and similar communities segregated by wealth
• The Māori in New Zealand
• The Syrian refuges in Europe
• Any religious community that choose to self-segregate
• Any prisoners or slaves wherever they may be.

For this paper we recognize that these segregated people may have very strong identities, but what they lack is very strong identifiers. if we include wealth, national origin and natural ability as a part of one's identity, then we can say that nearly all segregation is fixated on identity.

Problem

There are many differences in these situations but focusing on the need for identifiers to get access to many social benefits we find lots of common problems.

• . The majority of the population has benefits that they only grudgingly allow the minority segregated population to access.
• . The common approach to solving the problem in the past has focused on homogenization, that is on forcing one population to forgo their identity.
• . Here we assume that forcing people to change their identity to get identification is pure evil.

Assimilation

Somehow assimilation of one population into another is always posited as a solution whether or not the underservered part wants to be assimilated, which they may consider to be cultural and identity suicide. The Christian and other churches have always considered assimilation to be a moral imperative. The Black Robe is one description of the murderous effect of the Jusuit attempt to turn the native Americans into Christians. It is not pleasant reading.

Hannah Arndt put it like this in describing the Jews under Nazi rule

“It is as if under the pressure of persecution the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have called world . . . has simply disappeared. This produces a warmth of human relationships which may strike those who have had some experience with such groups as an almost physical phenomenon.” But the price of that warmth was too high to pay: “In extreme cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness. And worldlessness, alas, is always a form of barbarism.”