When I was in grade and high school (50’s and 60’s) we were taught about how the US is a melting pot. What this seemed to mean at the time is that immigrants did their best to assimilate into the dominant (anglo-saxon) culture while flavoring it with bits of their original culture they brought with them, like pizza and chow mein. (Race was kind of a separate discussion, and melting pot didn’t necessary include racial integration, at that time.)
I haven’t been taught in a classroom about multiculturalism, but it seems to mean that immigrants don’t necessarily assimilate any more than they absolutely have to to get along, they can keep as much of their original culture as they like (within limits) and that the dominant culture bends at least a little to accommodate them, including official recognition of other languages as valid for the conduct of government business. It also seems to include the idea that folks shouldn’t denigrate other cultures while at the same time adopting their dances, clothing or food.
Is this a continuum, or are these opposites? Or something else?
IMHO it all depends on whether a particular aspect of the culture is harmful or not. Note that this can go both ways, and in some cases the dominant “American” culture should probably drop some things that are toxic.
For example, if Filipinos want to have pancit and lumpias at Christmas, Latinos want to attend a Catholic mass in Spanish, Nigerians wanting to wear traditional west African clothing, or Muslims from wherever fast during the day during Ramadan, I have no issue with it. If those same Latinos want to impose some form of toxic masculinity, or the Muslims want to impose sharia law, then we have a completely different situation. Of course our culture has areas where others are better, and in those situations I have no problems with the immigrants position “winning.” Having much less access to guns would be a good example, and would apply to immigrants from almost any other country.
Two sides of the same coin. The melting pot emphasizes that we Americans are part of a single society. We celebrate the things we have have in common. On the other side, multiculturalism emphasizes that we Americans are diverse. We celebrate the differences among us.
I guess one prominent example of the difference between melting pot and multiculturalism is the tendency of some ethnic groups to anglicize their names (melting pot) or not (multiculturalism). Or whether one should consider WASP culture to be the default or that there be no default culture/ethnicity. Multiculturalism wouldn’t consider that the country belong to WASPs and everyone else is a guest.
The proper limits of multiculturalism likely haven’t been found yet. I can see potential problems if large swathes of a country integrate as little as the Amish or ultra-orthodox Jews. I think (but don’t know for a fact) that many multiculturalists would agree that having a lingua franca known by all is useful to have in a country. There may have been some promotions of multiculturalism which defended practices best left in the past by any culture.
This isn’t true. Pretty much every study has shown that immigrants today are assimilating into mainstream American culture much faster and much deeper than immigrants did in the past.
It’s not surprising. Immigrants have a lot more exposure to mainstream American culture via mass media and the internet than past generations of immigrants had. And with the global reach of these institutions, most immigrants are arriving in America already familiar with a good share of mainstream American culture.
Conversely, those same things expose “mainstream America” to the culture of those immigrants as well, which can make it seem like they aren’t “melting” as much. 50 years ago, there were very few televisions channels period, so you would be unlikely to flip through the channels and see anything but English language programs. 40 years ago, you might see a few non-English channels on cable or in major markets like LA or NY. Today, I can watch at least 6 languages via my digital antenna, and many more via Netflix or Youtube.
I want to be very clear about this. I was talking about the kind of thing that immigrants may do, not at all what they actually do because (I presume) they want to; note the word “necessarily” in the part you quoted.
In the melting pot that I learned about, people who didn’t try to assimilate were looked on as stubborn and pining for the old country, and possibly suspect. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be an American and to be just like other Americans? That was how it was then. Now I think there is less social pressure, even while there may be more political pressure, to assimilate.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for over 40 years, and it is a very multicultural experience. If you stand on a street corner with a lot of foot traffic (when we had such things) you would hear more conversations in other languages than in English. I’m not sure where that experience/anecdote fits in with the studies you mentioned.
If in fact modern immigrants are assimilating more deeply and thoroughly than ever, whence comes multiculturalism? Or is it less about immigrants and more about race?
She starts with Benjamin Franklin excoriating a group in ways that could easily be excerpted today and applied to many. He was speaking of Germans. The book proceeds through the Irish, Jews, Chinese, Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Japanese, and Muslims, showing how each successive group was treated almost identically in the beginning. She enumerates the laws passed to exclude them, the political parties formed to oppress them, and the vigilantes that burned their houses, destroyed their businesses, and killed individuals. Over and over and over. After time passed, many of the earlier groups got retroactively turned into “white people” as it became politically advantageous to do so, hence the melting pot mythology. The Immigration Act of 1924 virtually eliminated immigration of “undesirables” so the issue managed to fade over decades. Some similar form of twisted logic will apply to currently demonized groups in the future, presumably.
The demonization of “multiculturalism” is just the latest in this series. It is nothing new. A century ago, the KKK was practically a political party to itself and won governorships and representatives in Congress. Today, the Republicans are trying the same tactics. Don’t be fooled by the fancy wording. Same old sewer, same old stink.
You realize that Chinatown in San Francisco is over 170 years old? And that other similar enclaves have allowed (and sometimes forced) some immigrants to maintain their home cultures completely separate from the dominant culture?
There is a pattern that is far from universal, but is quite common.
The first generation of immigrants in a family settle among other immigrants from their homeland, and never learn to speak English very well.
The second generation have sort of split personalities. They view themselves as American, but their worldview is heavily influenced by old-world culture. They learn both English and their parent’s native language fluently. They often serve as translators for their parents.
The third generation are “all-American mutts,” and sometimes learn only a little of their grandparent’s language. Many of them have little interest in their family’s history.
That the U.S. has never been a melting pot. For most of its history, there was either forced, but limited, assimilation (slavery), or legally or socially mandated separation.
The melting pot idea is kind of a way to side step the racist legacy of the country. If Irish and Italian immigrants can transition into white Americans, surely Blacks, Asians, Latinos can too.
Nevermind that they were barred from white society for centuries, they just need try harder to be white now. And if everyone is white, then all the past racism is meaningless and can be ignored. And if they don’t become white, they must not be trying hard enough. Which makes racism their own fault.
American culture (by which I mean the culture common to all Americans) is a mishmash of everything: the foods, music, arts, language we share are drawn from many sources. We have influences from many immigrants’ cultures, from slaves’ cultures, from natives’ cultures. That’s the melting pot. And communities with America retain their own distinct cultures despite the commonality among all Americans. That’s the multiculturalism; we’re not homogeneous.
Part of our common American culture is racist. That doesn’t contradict that there is a melting pot drawing from many cultural influences. Some of the multicultural communities within America are racist. That doesn’t contradict that there is multiculturalism.
(I’ll take your word for it that some racists try to use the melting pot or multiculturalism to support their racism. They’re wrong about many things.)
I was posting on my phone, so I was somewhat brief. Mostly I was replying to the idea in the OP that we no longer have this melting pot that we had in the past, that immigrants stay separate from the mainstream more these days then they did in the past.
The melting pot metaphor, even when offered with the best intentions, comes from a position of a privileged place in society. You could only truly melt if you were white. Take me for example. My parents last names were Swiss and German. My grandmothers last names are Irish and Scottish. My wife is Italian and Spanish. My kids know a little about those heritages, but they don’t really directly impact them in any meaningful way on a day to day basis. That is not true for their friends whose parents are from India or China.
The very concept of whiteness was created to create a distinction between the slaves and the slavers. That was the whole purpose of race as we know it. And American whiteness is a trade off. European immigrants had the opportunity to leave their culture behind and stop being Irish or Italian and just be white. Holding on to too many traditions and aspects of other cultures was suspicious and could keep you from being fully accepted as white. It is better now, but it hasn’t been that long ago that JFK had to convince a good chunk of white America that being Catholic did not make him a non-American. Today that seems ridiculous, but it was just the final shift away from the convent burning mobs of the 1800s to full acceptance of Catholics as part of American whiteness.
The term melting pot may date back to the 18th century, but for most of its existence, skin color was an unbreakable barrier to melting. Black, Latino, and Asian immigrants could add a little flavor to the mix, but they were not allowed to be part of it.
I haven’t really heard the “salad bowl” metaphor that tried to replace it in while, but I didn’t like that much either.
If we need to strive to be food metaphor, I prefer a stew. All the ingredients remain distinct and identifiable, but both contribute to the overall gravy shared by and are changed by it, taking on new flavor while contributing their own without loosing a unique identity.
And what of Cultural Appropriation? Whether we want to use melting pot, multiculturalism, salad or stew, all of which I think are positives for our society, the cultural appropriation crowd doesn’t think so.
If I accept pizza, tacos, reggae, anime, Buddhist meditation, Christmas, as part of American culture am I a melting pot American, or a multiculturalist American?
Yeah, I grew up when it was transitioning from melting pot to stew, and stew is a much better analogy. If you immigrate to a new place, yeah, bring your culture and fly it proudly. Have parades. Introduce your neighbors to your foods. Play your music. I want to be introduced to those things.
But, I do also think that if you move to a new country, you have to make some effort as well. Learning the language. Not perfectly and not immediately, but over time make sure you can get around your new home and converse with people there on some level. Adjusting to the core principles of the new home. If men and women aren’t equal where you come from, well, leave that shit behind. Or maybe consider that this isn’t the right place for you.
A melting pot is just an amorphous homogeneous blob. But a stew becomes both different and better as you add stuff to it. The additions retain what they had before, but becomes part of something new.