Penny Thoughts: Melting Pot and Diversity

A few years ago, I was traveling back from a month-long teaching stint in Malaysia.  It was a 32-hour plane trip across the Pacific Ocean.  Such an odyssey gives one time to wonder about a multitude of things, events, conclusions, and consequences. 

Up there at 40.000 feet, cruising through cloud formations which reveal such beauty that one cannot deny the existence of God, I recall that I allowed my labyrinthine mind to wander and to wonder; to ponder and to engage ideas and historical events which comprise the human condition.

It allowed me the pleasure of freely indulging many ideas and notions. While reading an article in one of the airline magazines, I was prompted to focus on the echoes of a now almost extinct identity of our great Nation – one I was taught in every course from the third grade through high school graduation.  Most of you may remember it – “America is the ‘Melting Pot’ of the world!”

This identity made us all proud to be “American” regardless of the heritage from which we were spawned.  For “America” meant each of us had a real chance to become whatever we wanted to become without regard to ethnic heritage, creed, or religion.

And “America” grew with that designation and began to be enriched by the multitude of various cultures which contributed to the definition of being “American”.  Our music, our foods, our dress, our views of the world began to amalgamate with each new cast of ethnic characters which reached our borders.

Our trademark “American Ingenuity” and adaptability owed its genesis to this “Melting Pot” – and we can still see its vestiges today.

Still, through some twisted sense of xenophobia that amalgamation began to splinter.  It was exploited by power-hungry politicians who used it for the aggrandizement of their own power.

As a consequence, the carefully woven fabric threaded on the loom of the “Melting Pot” began to appear more as a loosely gathered patchwork of various “groups” which refused to surrender their individual heritages to the greater amalgamation and chose, instead, to be referred to as “”hyphenated-Americans” – Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans and so on.

A bad seed had been planted in the formation of the Melting Pot.  Some of the “first arrivers” did not like the new folk.  Their fear of these new folk began to take the form of institutionalized bigotry.

Not until the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in his argument in the land-mark case Brown v. Topeka did any vestige of a Melting Pot enjoy a reprieve. Before he was appointed to the High Court, Marshall argued as an attorney for the NAACP in that case. In his argument Marshall stated that there was a National “interest in obtaining the educational benefits from a diverse student body.”

It was in that argument the concept of “diversity” was born and began to replace the notion of a “Melting Pot” when it should have enhanced it.

“Diversity” as a social process and fact does immeasurably enhance a culture, makes it more robust and allows of new concepts and notions. In its very definition it implies tolerance, understanding and acceptance.  It does NOT demand that other ethnicities surrender their right to respect for their individual heritages, but merely that they are acknowledged as having an intrinsic value which, given the opportunity to express itself, can and will enhance the Melting Pot.

Somewhere along the way, from an intricate tapestry representative of our Melting Pot to a fragmented patchwork of monolithic ethnic groupings the application of “diversity” became a euphemism for individual rights based on “diversity” and birthed a truly patronizing decorum known as “Political Correctness”.

Let me be clear, diversity IS a vehicle which can again weave the tapestry America so desperately needs and wants today.  And I know that the notion of “Melting Pot” can work.  My work in Malaysia with their distinctly diverse populations is living evidence of such a possibility.  There, the indigenous Malays have blended successfully with the large Chinese and Indian populations.

I intend no homily here, but we must be on our guard NOT to allow the politics of divisiveness to engineer the strengths of diversity and yield an ugly, deceitful, and damaging process contrary to the natural inclinations of the majority of Americans. If we don’t, we will not even be a patchwork, but rather a tattering of loosely tied together threads unmatched, barely attached, and unrecognizable to the heritage we have sought to achieve as an American Melting Pot.