Reading Response 2

In his essay, People Like Us, David Brooks defends his claim that the United States is not composed of those seeking a culturally diverse environment, but rather those segregating into pods of similar people. Although contrary to a commonly perceived goal of Americans, Brooks reveals how abundant this attitude is in American culture. He uses detailed statistics, broad generalizations, and at-home examples that closely capture individual Americans to prove his point. Overall, Brooks transitioned my view of a "diverse" nation into a skeptical one.
Brooks discusses the composition of University faculties such as Brown to illustrate the lack of diversity in America. He uses Universities because they are supposed to be a haven for the culturally diverse. He shows that the body of instructors is not reflective of the actual population--that a majority of Brown professors are Democratic rather than Republican and if it were diverse, it would be closer to half. While this composition of professors was not surprising to me as a college student, it did support Brooks's idea of people finding niches and reinforcing them.
Brooks also explains a marketing firm's 62 categories for people. While this seems narrow, the categories fairly accurately group all of America into tiny boxes based on their income and likes. While I found this to be scary, it shows that we as people are predictable in our interests and that we are not as unique and accepting of diversity as we would like to be.
Brooks's position of an anti-melting pot society is clearly defended by the research he has done. His use of a variety of characteristics of different groups in America has a way of bringing an individual into the article. The way Brooks describes neighborhoods and how they begin to develop personalities can be identified by anyone in the U.S.. Overall, Brooks's literary devices really aided in his attempt to display the human tendency to avoid diversity.