This always seemed to me one of the noblest ideas of the American dream. Sure there was a hell of a long way to go and many obstacles to surmount but that was always the goal: one nation, one people.
You don’t hear much about it now. The trend seems to be towards a fissiparous nation with Europeans, Latinos, African-Americans et al identifying themselves by their racial characteristics or ancestral national identities rather than as primarily and solely Americans.
So what do you think? Has the melting pot failed and if so should it be revivified? If at first you don’t succeed …
My parents were melting-pot-ideology idealists so I’d like to speak to this.
I was raised in the South (capital “S”; Valdosta GA) in the 1960s. My folks were not unusual in their outspoken belief in racial equality and the moral wrongness of racism. Yes, we had neighbors who thought it was cool and southern-assertive to go around dropping racial epithets and I had teachers who would take our class to a skating rink that didn’t allow blacks (on the grounds that it didn’t matter this year because we didn’t have any black kids in our class, last year the class couldn’t go because there was, and it’s embarrassing and unfortunate that the skating-rink owner is like that but hey it’s not an issue this year).
Technology and rationality and American values would triumph and the world was going to be a better place.
Everyone, regardless of their background, was going to be allowed equal access to the good life, and it would start with them all embracing the white upper middle class values which are of course the right ones. We would not keep those other-flavored folks out! Episcopalean homogeneity for everyone!
To answer your question(s), explicit and implicit alike, the problem was the honest earnest unquestioned assumption that all of the marginalized people would want to be like “us”.
I think the melting pot was always a bit oversold. That happens, but it takes place over a longer time than we’ve though. I still think it happens over generations.
But economics plays a part as well. There was always enough of the pie if you worked hard enough long enough. And that may not be the case today, especially for the middle class.
The melting pot is real enough. Certainly, in my circle of friends and co-workers, and among the families at my son’s school, there’s a tremendous amount of ethnic diversity and a high level of interracial marriages.
There still ARE middle class, “All American” kids of every ethnicity. The melting pot has t gone away.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t places where some immigrant groups cluster, isolate themselves, and either can’t or won’t try to assimilate.
I agree, multiethnic and multiracial families are the new melting pot. The social barriers between races and cultures with respect to love and marriage are breaking down at an increasing rate. Even if assimilation into a diverse society by older whites, minorities and immigrants decreases, there are fewer constraints on who their children and grandchildren are attracted to. Pride in ethnic heritage will keep the positive aspects such as cuisine and cultural celebrations alive, but multiracial families will inexorably weed out racial and cultural resistance to diversity. America is moving, for the better, towards a a browner population.
It’s true that we don’t hear as much about it as we used to. But make no mistake–the melting pot is still working.
If you doubt this, all you have to do is take a look at the number of Muslims in America who have become radicalized versus the number of Muslims in European countries who have become radicalized.
On a per capita basis, I don’t think european Muslims are radicalized any more than Americans. There is a much larger Muslim population as a percentage in Europe, resulting is larger raw number of radicalized Muslims, even if assimilation is slower in the Muslim community.
I know that “anecdotes do not equal data,” but let me offer some anecdotal experiences.
Just the other day, I visited my podiatrist, Dr. Patel. When you hear the name “Patel,” you probably get a certain picture in your mind. But if you asked anyone who met Dr. Patel to describe him in one word, I suspect the word would be “preppy.”
Seriously, his parents were Indian immigrants, but he was born and raised in Oregon. He’s as wholesome and as thoroughly American as the Brady Bunch. He could have taken Marcia to the prom and nobody would have raised an eyebrow.
I now teach at a fairly affluent high school in the suburbs of Austin. I meet wholly Americanized kids of every ethnicity every day. Filipino kids who play football, Arab kids who play Dungeons and Dragons, Pakistani girls who dig gangster rap, Mexican girls who are into lesbian folk music, whatever.
Yes, there are places where ethnic groups gather together and try to hang on to the old ways. There always have been such places (Chinatowns, Little Italy’s, etc all.). But if you visited my school, you’d see the melting pot is still working.
Politics and money happened to it. Some people found that there was money to be made by embracing the “salad bowl” concept instead of the melting pot. Others got on board and now we have schools forced to teach kids in forty-lebben different languages instead of English, thereby insuring that they will not speak, read or write English well and condemning them to a second-rate life and dependency on big government.
I agree, but I’d go a bit further. It’s not clear that a % number is even the right way to go, as there is no reason it has to be linear. Also, the type of immigrants matter. In the US, we get mostly the highly educated, skilled folks from Muslim countries immigrating here, while many European countries get folks from the lower socio-economic classes (from their former colonies) who are more likely to become disaffected in the next generation as they don’t see their chances for success as remotely as good as their non-immigrant peers.
As for what happened to the melting pot in The US, I’d say “the 60s happened”. There was a cultural shift away from conformity more towards a multi-ethnic view of society. The old ways were seen as stifling, and folks were suddenly open to a society where everyone did their own thing or identified with whatever group he or she chose.
Originally the melting pot referred to white people of various ethic backgrounds: Irish, Italians, Scandinavians, Germans, Poles, Russians, and (with a lot of retained bigotry) Jews. The melting pot consisted of the second generation losing their parents’ accents, assimilating into American anglo-saxon culture, and more or less becoming indistinguishable by speech or appearance from English-descended people. The only vestiges of the “old country” being surnames and what foods were family favorites. It also helped that nativist fears that Catholics would place religion over country weren’t borne out. In other words, the melting pot wasn’t multiculturalism in more than the most trivial sense- it was assimilation. And remember that all this took decades or generations. For other ethnic groups it’s been a harder sell. African-Americans need no comment. Asians like Chinese and Japanese remained heavily ghettoized and were still regarded with suspicion and resentment. Hispanics were looked down upon as wetbacks and “bean eaters”
It’s been slow but there has been progress, it’s just that every twenty years or so there’s been a new group starting the process from scratch. Remember jokes about Vietnamese and Hmong eating family dogs? I think we’re finally past that. Now we have immigrants and refugees from Somalia and the Middle East who are mostly still first generation. It doesn’t help that many of the new immigrants wear distinctive clothing for religious purposes (like Orthodox Jews did in their day) which immediately stamps them as “other”. And of course the ongoing war with terrorism means that Muslim immigrants are as poorly regarded as German-Americans were during World War One.
Here’s my hypothesis: acceptance into the mainstream goes up dramatically once immigrants learn to speak colloquial American English with an American accent.
There never was a “melting pot”, at least in the way you think it existed. During the 19th century our country was dotted with ethnic communities where languages other than English were spoken by default, school, religious services, newspapers, and on and on used the old language. My Grandfather despite having parents born in America grew up speaking German at home as his first language. Then along came World War One. And then my great-grandparents decided that German wasn’t a thing anymore, and nobody in the family was allowed to speak German.
Mocking it doesn’t make it any less true. The melting pot ideal was racist, because it presumed an ideal of everyone becoming more like us. It was imperialist, since it was about the immigrants changing. The microaggressions involve people trying to make it happen, pointing out when everyone is different. And it was used as an excuse for cultural appropriation–they’re American now–they don’t have their own culture.
The concept of cultures mixing and immigrants adapting to the local culture is still alive and well. But the ideal of a melting pot to a monoculture has been replaced with an attempt at a multiculture with tolerance. The idea is that people will be 100% American, while also holding on to their roots.
We no longer need this idea that everyone become the same for us to treat them equally. Or, at least, that’s the ideal.
Stringbean! I thought you left. And doorhinge, hope springs eternal.
What happened was sex. The core of cultural assimilation since the Neanderthals. It became okay to “date” others. When my parents were young a “mixed marriage” involved people from different parishes, since one was Irish and the other Italian. A bus line made that possible. Then a car expanded ones horizons even further. Today my daughter is engaged to a Japanese guy living in England she met online. Humans have always been mutt wannabes. Now we can be.
The problem is just that you’re missing the tense. What America had, still has, and will continue to have for the foreseeable future is a melting pot. You seem to be expecting a melted pot. There are now, and always have been, new immigrants who have not yet assimilated. With time, those immigrants have, and will, assimilate, to be replaced by the next generation of unassimilated immigrants, from some other country. And what they’re assimilating to is an amalgam of all of the history of immigration up to that point. A current immigrant, from Mexico or Syria or Tanzania, will soon enough learn to eat pizza and hot dogs, but it wasn’t all that long ago that pizza was the exotic foreign food, and hot dogs not too long before that.
