People Like Us

The primary theme of “People Like Us” is the difference between a diverse population and a truly culturally mixed society. The essay never suggests that the United States is not diverse; it provides numerous examples of the various cultures and communities that exist throughout the nation. This evidence, however, leads the author to conclude that the country does not consist of an evenly mixed population of people living different lives. Instead, the American population comprises distinct pockets of people, each of which is to a large extent internally uniform. In some areas, these pockets exist along broad geographic lines, such as the prevalence of socially liberal views in urban and coastal areas versus the more conservative rural population in interior states. In other areas these distinctions exist on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level. In addition to discussing geographic segregation, the article argues that people tend to choose people similar to themselves as marriage partners, work in roles that conform to their personalities, and consume the same media as people with similar backgrounds.

Brooks’s argument centers mostly on ideological—or at least cultural—diversity. Although he briefly notes the persistence of racial segregation in the post-Jim Crow era, he does not discuss how that segregation has evolved over time. Likewise, the article says little about geographic segregation along class lines or how the idea that this segregation is voluntary relates to lower-income regions and neighborhoods. This is not necessarily a flaw in Brooks’s essay; rather, it may simply reflect the fact that he is writing for a predominantly affluent and moderate-to-liberal audience—the sort of people who have gone to the colleges that, Brooks argues, conceive of diversity primarily in racial terms while ignoring the significance of ideological diversity. Brooks himself suggests as much in his final call to action, which describes the kind of audience he envisions for his article: “If you live in a coastal, socially liberal neighborhood, maybe […] you should stop in at a megachurch” (Paragraph 18). In a certain sense, the necessity of tailoring his argument this way perhaps proves Brooks’s point, but it is still worth noting what his argument leaves out.