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The connection to white nationalism is specious. Everyone in this story is brown. The differences are about beliefs and culture, not skin color.

It also projects western circumstances onto places where it doesn’t make sense. Multiculturalism is a cultural adaptation to America being a post-colonial, post-slavery, immigrant nation. In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns. The moral connotations are very much tied up in the fact that those other cultural groups are in western countries because of the stuff western people did that wasn’t so nice. That doesn’t have any force when you’re talking about Hindus in India or the Japanese in Japan. Indeed in India it probably cuts the other way. My surname didn’t make its way 3,000 miles from the Middle East to Bangladesh through a process that was very nice.



In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns.

I don't think even a cursory look at the history of Europe in the last few hundred years bears that out - you can probably start at the peace of Westphalia and keep going to the current war in Ukraine. The connection to white nationalism is not specious, it's precisely because it's a form of ethno-nationalism.


Just to be clear: Razib Khan makes the connection to white nationalism, not me. It happens that Razib Khan is himself probably a racial supremacist. But I didn't even have pull any of this in from Khan's background; it was in the article you chose to cite.


> My surname didn’t make its way 3,000 miles from the Middle East to Bangladesh through a process that was very nice.

Now you've got me curious ....


Bangladesh used to be East Bengal. Through a series of demographic changes, it became East Pakistan in 1947 and then Bangladesh in 1971.


Yes, I'm old enough to remember the 1971 war of independence; I was wondering about Rayiner's surname that he mentioned as having migrated from the Middle East. (I could hazard a guess ....)




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