As a follow-up to my diversity post, this has been making the rounds. One of the things no one ever discusses is how non-whites feud with one another. Here on Diversity Street I see it all the time. Indians and Koreans own the cash businesses. We also have some Nepalese in there, but most people assume they are Indians. The Koreans have their own off-the-books financing system to help new comers get a start. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 28 percent of Korean-American men and 20 percent of Korean-American women own their own business—the highest rate of entrepreneurship in the country. Indians have something similar, but it is more kin-based.

The result is Koreans and Indians own a lot of small retail business in and around the ghetto. These are businesses that are not high margin, but are high risk. It takes balls of stone to own a liquor store in the ghetto. Running a gas station near the ghetto is almost a death wish. That’s why they can be had for cheap and that’s why immigrants take these businesses.

I used to know a Palestinian guy who owned a C-store near the ghetto. He was missing an arm, having had it blown off back in the territories. Compared to dodging terrorists and gangsters in a refuge camp, selling smokes and skittles in the ghetto was a good deal. He said you get used to dealing with the world through bullet-proof glass. You really can’t question the logic. It is why I am not a closed border absolutist.

Anyway, I suspect that’s why blacks hate foreigners so much. From what I’m told, they used to hate the Jews for the same reason. The Jews moved out of the cities and out of the retail businesses, but that used to be their domain not so long ago. Now, it is the Koreans and Indians serving this “community” and getting nothing but grief for their trouble.

We’re going to see a lot more of this as the nation becomes majority-minority. When one ethnic group can dominate the rest, the minorities tend to band together. For most of American history, WASP culture dominated American culture and everyone else fell in line. The “everyone else” was mostly Catholics and blacks. When no one group dominates, then it becomes a free-for-all. Everyone has a reason to distrust everyone else. Balkanization soon follows. Charles Murray predicts a rabid re-segregation at some point.

The interesting thing to me is that whites would never charge this woman for the water. Indians and Koreans are baffled by the weird racial politics of America. It is hard to tell the ethnicity of the store owners in the video, but they clearly share the same bafflement. Oddly, they don’t see the woman as black. She’s just another customer. That’s where the trouble starts. The woman is used to being given a wide berth for the many trifling impositions she makes on the rest of us. When she runs into someone unwilling to give way, she naturally assumes it is racism.

Suspicion of those outside the group is a behavioral trait that most likely pre-dates all others. Our own history of race tells us this is not a behavior that is easily modified. President Obama, who is multi-racial, wears his racial suspicion like a medallion. His attorney general, from Barbados, is proudly hostile to whites. If reaching the peak of society is not tempering these traits, it’s not happening at the other end of society either. Throw in a bunch of of new groups with their own grievances and the result will be a lot of public shouting.

This is the future. America will be a country where everyone gets frustrated with everyone outside their group. The public space, where groups intersect, will be a 24×7 shouting match about who owes what to whom. History provides no examples of a country dominated by a grievance culture. Up until now, people have been smart enough to keep their distance from one another whenever possible. Maybe everything will work out just fine. Or, maybe not. Time will tell.