Civility discourse ties social decline to urban diversity and incivility

Evidence

Civility’s fading (and failing), so commonly supposed as the contemporary condition, has been attributed for the most part to the increasing heterogeneity and diversification of modern urban environments. It has been blamed also for a variety of social ills. These have ranged from charges of selfish and hyper-individualized societies, care-less and increasingly litigious (consider Stephen Carter’s flat and flatulently insistent excuse for Christian revivalism), to complaints of societies stricken by runaway crime rates, vulgarity and violence (as in James Q. Wilson’s causal connection of crime to rising incivility). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 180

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s threatened-privilege generalization test — here the anxiety channel is framed as ‘heterogeneity causes incivility,’ a racialized-contact claim over urban diversity of bodies rather than institutions. — connects to: Incivility is endogenous to civil society rather than its outside — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 254; Civility depends on negotiating difference and dies with racial sameness — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 225; Civility discourse smuggles in exclusion of those deemed different — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 208
• QUESTION: Worth chasing whether Carter/Wilson’s civility framing — diversity causal claims — is an antecedent of today’s contact/institution conflation that the reader is testing.

Broader Connections

• Civility discourse smuggles in exclusion of those deemed different #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 208
• Incivility is endogenous to civil society rather than its outside #contradicts (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 254
• Civility depends on negotiating difference and dies with racial sameness #complicates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 225