Diversity: "People Like Us"

Part 1: Summary of "People Like Us" by David Brooks

People like us is an article about America's diversity, well actually it's about the lack of diversity within our diverse culture. Mr. Brooks proclaims that America boasts for being an extremely diverse society; but he shows many examples of how America is still segregated by choice, by habits and other measurable categories. Mr. Brooks proclaims that people of the same race and income level tend to flock together and live in the same communities. Some examples of this is Black's tend to live in the same neighborhoods by class, being low income, middle class, upper middle. He also says people move to areas that are known for certain characteristics such as mountain bikers moving to a certain city because that city is known be to have a large mountain biker population. Mr. Brooks says trends and tendencies like this makes America less diversified and this makes most places look the same as other neighborhoods in other area with the same type of people. People look for cultural affinity and move there.

Mr. Brooks spends a lot of time explaining high end professions tend to have certain commonalities such as most college professors who teach Sociology tend to be democrats. So in return they only hire other democrats to fill vacant positions, thus eliminating diversity in the work place regarding politics. Some colleges only hire republicans.

The author also says marketing firms track our habits and can accurately predict what each group or class of people will purchase and live. These firms have vast data on all groups of people and target them by what others like them have done and are doing.

Finally Mr. Brooks suggest to break the norms and do something totally uncharacteristic for your race or culture.