America’s Challenge: Getting Along With People We Don’t Like : Law: Equal opportunity ought to be the focus of public policy, not quotas, not ethnic or gender politics. Education is the proper place to begin.

The Vietnamese woman waded with her children in the dark green waters, seining fish. It could have been the Mekong. Instead, it was a city lake in Riverside. Immigrants carry into their new world habits from the old.

These habits often do not suit their new surroundings. Children more readily adapt, but they often disappoint their parents doing so: They give up the mother tongue and marry outsiders. Subsequent generations find little solace in their “modernity”--they have no sense of a past. So rivalries develop between clans, creeds and cultures, as each ethnocentric circle defines a form of life that’s theirs.

Diversity frequently breeds violence and oppression--gangs warring against each other, blacks fighting Koreans, straights bashing gays, newcomers losing out for jobs against good-old-boy connections. The melting pot is more a nightmare than a dream.

How can a community emerge from these conflicting identities, without homogenizing them all away? The common alloy of humanity is not strong enough to solidify the habits of the heart we need to call our own.

There never was--and never will be--a single American way of life. Top-down solutions to impose one have always led to futile conflict. Trying to live without any social or familial sense of ourselves is just as self-destructive. We need connections with cultures, creeds and family to identify ourselves. Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty suggests we visualize community in terms of a bazaar rather than a single, shared habit of the heart.

All walks of life, creeds or colors intermingle in public commerce, only to return to private lives and exclusive associations of family, friends, religious and cultural identities. Public lives co-exist alongside private preferences and even racial prejudice. Yet we try to get along with each other so we can live the kind of life we want for ourselves and all our clan. Such is the American free marketplace. The open secret of its successes, when compared with far more troubled places in the world, is the presence of a common law.

By defining every citizen as equal, the American rule of law distances itself from ethnocentricity. Justice only governs the bazaar. It cannot govern how we think of one another. Our choice of lifestyle is mostly up to us and the private associations we move within. The only time the law will interfere with private lives is when they interfere with the life of the bazaar, when any are excluded or afforded preferential treatment. At least that’s the way it ought to be.

Yet, if you ask new immigrants or vulnerable minorities, they will mention presures for conformity as ubiquitous as the salutary presence of the American rule of law. It’s as if Americans were supposed to have no private identities at all, as if all were supposed to be the same.

Each new wave of immigration seems ever more threatening to the status quo, when, in fact, immigration vitalizes the marketplace. Soon there will be no single ethnic plurality to dominate the scene, as private lives will increasingly intermingle, multiplying a web of differing connections. Even so, we all don’t have to like each other or admire each others’ lifestyles; we still can have our own cultural connections, our own friends.

But government regulations often function at cross-purposes to the common sense of justice. As well-intended as they are, affirmative-action programs, racial quotas and the constant bureaucratic questionnairing of ethnic histories focus on our differences, thereby undermining our equality as citizens.

The only thing that is supposed to matter to the law is the content of one’s character. It is one thing to prosecute those who would deny the civil rights of others. It is quite another to try to sculpt the marketplace.

Some explicitly would want a singular American way of life even if it infringed, for example, upon the rights of women or gays. Those who see little harm with prayer in public schools will not respect the difference between a common way of life and the rule of a common law. To play the ethnic card in politics has always been a dirty trick. It threatens diversity within community by making members rivals of each other. Justice must be blind, not selectively near-sighted.

The Bush Administration, as well as Congress, are pursuing civil-rights policies without respecting the principle of fairness, playing ethnic politics while proclaiming quotas to be evils and advocating rights of varying protection, so that handicapped or women have less recourse before the law than blacks.

Some would put the burden of proof on employers, assuming prejudice exists unless employers prove their innocence. It’s a shameful thing to do.

Then there are those peculiar regulations, consented to by Congress and the courts, that pay physicians for their silence, forbiding them from sharing what they know about abortion with poor pregnant women living here and in the Third World. That’s gender prejudice.

Justice is not served by selective intervention in the lives of private citizens. Equal opportunity ought to be the focus of public policy, not quotas, not ethnic or gender politics. Education is the proper place to intervene, before children enter the work force. Unless more black males graduate from high schools, they will never function as citizens. Unless sex, drug and prenatal education is learned in junior high, there will be whole generations of mentally deficient persons who must be cared for by the rest of us.

There is a paradox embedded in the American community: Diversity resists assimilation. Yet diversity is necessary to keep community alive.