A place where ethnicity/race is not an issue. Truth, reality or crackpot utopia? Are we too hardwired to tribalism or could a true melting pot ever happen?
Colombia, Brazil, Peru, in the urban areas. Next question?
There’s no place that’s perfect.
My old Anthropology profs insisted the “melting pot” concept of America was a myth, in that the different ethnicities did not lose their characteristics and meld into a solid whole. They said a “mixed salad” would be a better metaphor.
Honolulu is a good example. I look white but am half Filipino and my friends when I moved from Hawaii included a black-Filipino, a Chinese-Italian, a Hawaiian-Irish, a full blooded Japanese, a full blooded Italian, a Filipino-Caucasian (like me, but who couldn’t pass), a full blooded black dude, a full blooded Korean, a Samoan-Chinese-Other and I’m married to a Thai-Irish lady.
That isn’t at all unusual for Hawaii.
How about one of those sword blades where you have different kinds of steel folded together in thin layers? That gets the concept of mixing, while still retaining separate identities, with the whole being stronger for it.
Being by and large the non-violent type (except for one who had been a Marine in the Pacific and stormed Iwo Jima, but then even he later became a 1960s hippie), that one never occurred to them.
I’m a non-violent type, too. I just think swords are cool.
I like the musical metaphor John Sayles used in Matewan.
I suppose it depends how you define “not an issue.” I was going to say Hawaii as well, but there are normal human social behaviors that Hawaii is not immune from. People with things in common, whether it be heritage, physical appearance, or language, are going to be drawn to one another and take pride in that and mentally separate themselves from others because of that. Hawaii still has ethnic and cultural stereotypes, jokes, and slurs. There’s a lot of variety, but sometimes all that means is you have a lot more different kinds of people to make fun of.
As I understand it, Britain is a melting pot of every people who ever invaded or emigrated there – Picts, Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, Irish, even Spanish Lascars – melting pot in the sense that anyone you meet, up to and including peers of the realm, could have ancestors from any or all of these groups, you don’t know and they don’t know. Not yet a melting pot for all those darker-skinned chaps from the sunnier climes of the Empire, but someday, maybe.
We have the most mixed marriages in Europe.
Lots of white Americans today have no one identifiable European ethnicity. It just stopped mattering, around about the mid-20th-Century, whether your ancestors were English or Irish or German or Polish or whatever; any white person you meet might have any or all of those in the woodpile. Barring really zealous religious differences, marriage between any two white Americans simply does not present a problem (at least, not an ethnicity-related problem). Eventually the generic-American group might expand to include everybody.
Looking into it further, Wikipedia says:
“After 1970 the desirability of assimilation and the melting pot model was challenged by proponents of multiculturalism, who assert that cultural differences within society are valuable and should be preserved, proposing the alternative metaphor of the salad bowl – different cultures mix, but remain distinct.”
This is obviously where my profs were coming from, as it describes what they taught to a T and is the right time period.
IOW, they were not saying that the melting pot has not happened or is not happening, but, rather, that it is not desirable?
I call bullshit on that!
shrug suit yourself. I think you’re taking it too seriously. These were anthropology profs, cultural anthropology, and of course they deal with the intricacies of different cultures. I tend towards their view and don’t see any bullshit with it myself.