Hanston Town Crisis Final Solution

¶ … Hanston Town Crisis case study presents us with a town that is expanding rapidly in population and experiencing demographic change to include African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans -- even Jews. We are asked to consider the committee of five white people appointed by the mayor to help Hanston accommodate its rapid demographic changes. Obviously the real crisis in Hanston begins with this mayor's utterly tone-deaf decision. If the ultimate goal in Hanston is multicultural inclusiveness (as opposed to homogeneity achieved through racial cleansing) then the make-up of the committee is wholly inappropriate.

Here we follow the definition of McDonald (1998) who offers a description of "a multicultural society in which there is ...diffusion of power among a variety of groups" (87). The mayor's failure to include any blacks or Latinos or Asians on the committee sends a strong message, and the mayor would be advised immediately to include on the committee at least one black or Latino or Asian-American committee member.

If the purpose of the mayor's committee is to address the question of how best to accommodate the new members of society -- and to get them to unite around an obvious common civic purpose -- this kind of inclusive gesture is paramount.

In evaluating the different existing members of the committee as they are described in the case study, it is worth noting that the group is also politically fairly similar: three conservatives and one moderate as opposed to a single liberal indicates that committee membership is already tilted ideologically.

After all one committeee member is described as "organizing the town to oppose the state's propsal to put a residence for mentally retarded adults in their community." That enough people can be organized for such opposition indicates a strong desire on the part of Hanston township for a homogenous purpose -- after all, a large number of mentally retarded adults inhabiting a relatively small town can lead to difficulties with pedestrian and automobile traffic, increased strain on limited social services resources, and also quality of life issues such as littering, noise pollution, and indecent exposure.

This should not be confused, however, with the committee's attempt to accommodate Hanston's new black, Latino and Asian-American citizens: after all, intermarriage between these groups and white persons is relatively common in the twenty-first century, something which more or less never occurs (for sound eugenic reasons) with the mentally retarded.

This would extend the multicultural impulse to the point where it becomes damaging to the social fabric, exemplified by Dalrymple's remarks in the Wall Street Journal that "multiculturalism is damaging because it denies that, when it comes to culture, there is a better and a worse, a higher and a lower -- only difference" (Dalrymple 2012). The effective accommodation of difference, however, is marked by the fact that religiously speaking, four different religious sects (Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, and even Unitarian) are represented.

Eliot famously observed the importance of religion when he recommended that a "population should be homogenous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background" (1933, 19-20).

Although the committee now might seem religiously unified, they disagree in important ways: Unitarians, for example, do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the historic connection between Unitarian "freethinkers" and political liberalism is demonstrated in the case study. Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic churches, however, include many.