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Comment by gukov | Hacker News Reader

American society is as good as it gets when it comes to inclusion. No other country, except maybe for Canada, had to deal with multiculturalism as much.

Humans are complicated social creatures by nature. There will always be cliques, competitiveness, the us against them mentality, etc. It's who we are. It's what got us here.

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> No other country, except maybe for Canada, had to deal with multiculturalism as much.

There is a Christian majority country in the world that also has a ~15% Muslim minority, and it's not even particularly geographically confined. It's not US or Canada.

Curiously, it's also not a particularly inclusive country. Which just goes to show that multiculturalism doesn't necessarily translate to inclusiveness - it can also encourage silos.

Sounds like Russia?

Yep, it's Russia.

(Well, and possibly others - that's just the one that I know of, there may well be others.)

I'm going to guess France, which has around that percentage of Muslims and is certainly not geographically confined.

More like 6%

I stand corrected, thanks. The Google article preview listed a much wider confidence interval of estimates.

Russia is an Empire though.

Its Multiculturalism has always been about hadling Subjects who could become Citizens by Russifying.

That hasn't been true since 1917. There are plenty of citizens in Russia who hail from other religious or ethnic groups, and they aren't any worse for it in terms of political rights.

The difference is how it is handled. Russia is structured as a federal republic, in which some constituent entities are explicitly designated as national republics. Those have their own official state language (in addition to Russian on the federal level), their own regional constitutions and laws etc.

But it also means that for the titular ethnicity, when they're outside of such a regional republic, they can face an attitude of "we don't do these things here, and if you really want to, you can go back home and do them there". In other words, different cultures are siloed rather than amalgamated.

This is oversimplified, because there's still plenty of amalgamation in practice - it's inevitable when people live and work and intermarry. But it's definitely very distinct from e.g. Canadian multiculturalism.

That's actually the point the previous poster is trying to make. It's easy to have an inclusive society when everyone in that society is the same, and it's difficult to have one when there is so much cultural variation within it. One of the things that can be said for the U.S. is that it is fairly inclusive considering how diverse it is.

Canada is certainly a major instigator, but expand your thinking outside North America and you may be surprised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

Interesting but they seem to be treating all cultures the same rather than weighting the relative differences between cultures. Papua New Guinea may have a lot of cultures, but they are a lot more similar than Indian and French cultures for example.

My decade of living in London suggests otherwise, on both the notion of inclusion and the claim that no other country has dealt so much with multiculturalism, which just sounds uninformed to me.

It's inclusive for all the assorted WASPs, and assorted WASP-clones. Everyone else hits a wall.

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