Letter to the Editor – Fargo Forum

Dear Mr. Pinnon:

I’m writing in response to Ross Nelson’s piece titled, “Diversity Weakens, Not Strengthens, A Country,” dated 11 August 2018.  Mr. Nelson has also written similar articles of equal journalistic merit (or lack thereof), including “The Lunatic Left Has Blown a Gasket,” “Politically Correct Feminism Has Gone too Far,” and “Political Correctness Robs Us of Truth” in which he stunningly describes “the great Robert E. Lee” who, out of paternalistic condescension, once said of blacks, “The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope will prepare and lead them to better things.”

From what worldly purview does Mr. Nelson purport to understand the nation well enough to be a published pundit on domestic policy?  The only reference to his credentials with the Forum can be found in a March 18, 2007, article in which you publish that he is a postal worker.  You presently state nothing about his qualifications as a journalist, other than that he resides in Casselton, North Dakota.

The demographics of Mr. Nelson’s town of Casselton are 98.2% white. By contrast, America is 62% white (Source: 2010-2015 Census). Casselton, with its population of 2,329 residents as of 2010, is smaller than a single statistical unit in Census terms.  Each person surveyed by the U.S. Census Bureau represents an estimated 3,000 others.  Casselton isn’t so much as a rounding error in the representative world view of Americans.

From the mid-twentieth century the demographic makeup of America has been staggeringly more diverse than Casselton, starting in 1940 at 89% white and then 80% white by 1980.

From 1940-2015, in inflation adjusted dollars, our real GDP per capita did not decline. It quadrupled.  The number of patents per year grew from 48,000 in 1963 to 326,000 in 2015.

In 1940 the U.S. had 23 Nobel laureates.  Since 1940, we have had 348 more, 104 of whom are immigrants. That is nearly eight times the annual average by 1940.

What Mr. Nelson is bemoaning is not the effects of diversity on creativity, but the tendency for there to be clashes over civil rights because an emboldened group of xenophobes within a racial majority are having to adjust to the reality that colonial imperialism and growth off the backs of slave labor have drawn to a close in the Information Age, that his protected class of mediocrity (what he has written is so poorly researched it barely qualifies as journalistic commentary) feels threatened by change with which they cannot keep pace.

White men of mediocre ability have always opposed progress. They opposed emancipation. Our nation got stronger for it. They opposed women’s suffrage. Our nation charged on. They opposed gay rights.

The sun has not set on America. Quite the opposite. And it’s not that all white men are mediocrities. But only the mediocre among them complain about change.

The able thrive in diverse environments which facilitate a larger range of ideas and innovations from which to draw.

What is most unsettling of all is not the laziness, ineptitude, and bewildering entitlement of Mr. Nelson who cannot be bothered to research a single fact, and must reach backward to the 1700s for a justification that amounts to “tradition” and “patriotism”, ignoring both the words of Samuel Johnson and the fact that our Founders knew well enough that they didn’t know everything (hence Article V), or that General Washington, the Father of Our Nation, hoped, “to ever see our Nation among the foremost examples of justice and liberality.”

What is most disturbing about Mr. Nelson, and your continued publication of his haphazard writing, is that he doesn’t understand the single most important reason for embracing rather than marginalizing and scapegoating others:  because it is the moral thing to do.

Rubin Safaya
Executive Editor
Cinemalogue

Published on the Fargo Forum website on 13 August 2018.