Don't Kill The Melting Pot

In my elementary school days, we learned that the United States of America was a great nation because it was a melting pot. People immigrate to America from various countries and continents and become part of the fabric of American society, we were told, and this in turn makes our nation a better, stronger place. Although the American citizenry is diverse, with numerous differences, among them race, ethnicity, and religion, we could all be unified under one banner: American.

That is the concept of the melting pot, and it's a sound concept. I was always able to envision the melting pot in my head: a bunch of substances, varying in shape, size, color, and composition, were melted together in one big vat until they seemed to be one single substance. All the original ingredients were still present in the pot, but they had been combined to produce one final product. All these diverse ingredients blended together to form a uniquely American brand.

But increasingly, the melting pot idea, with its emphasis on assimilation and national unity, has come under fire from the multiculturalists, who prefer a different metaphor for America: the salad bowl. Under this formulation, members of racial/ethnic minority groups are actively encouraged to maintain faithful to their home countries/cultures rather than assimilate themselves into the American cultural fabric. Like the melting pot, the salad bowl is also easy to imagine: a big bowl with different ingredients...but rather than combining to form one substance, the carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, lettuce, etc. remain separate and distinct. In the salad bowl metaphor, America is the bowl: it merely serves as a container for a bunch of distinct ingredients. In the melting pot metaphor, America is the pot...but, more importantly (and unlike the contents of the salad bowl), the stuff inside the pot is emphatically American.

Recently, the New York Times ran an article about the ambivalence toward identity that members of one specific minority group increasingly display. The group? Latinos. (The link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/us/11pew.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss) The Pew Hispanic Center conducted a study and the report contained the following statement: “The melting pot is dead. Long live the salad bowl."

How'd they reach this conclusion? Well, here are some numbers...and for anyone who sees the advantages of assimilation and the problems with multiculturalism, they're alarming: "When asked how [young Latinos] first described themselves, 52 percent said their preference was for their family’s country of origin — Dominican, Mexican, Cuban, etc. — over American, which 24 percent favored. Even fewer, 20 percent, responded Hispanic or Latino."

But wait, there's more. And this is even more depressing: "48 percent of the young Latinos (ages 16 to 25) said they spoke English very well or pretty well." 48 percent? Good God. What could possibly account for these results? Mark Hugo Lopez, the associate director of the Pew Center, has a guess: “Generally, among young Hispanics, their parents are more likely to talk of pride in being from a specific country of origin and encourage them to speak Spanish,” Mr. Lopez said. “There is a strong emphasis on Hispanic cultural identity.”

It starts at home, according to Mr. Lopez, and surely he's right. But this is only a partial explanation. The follow-up to "it starts at home" is "it CONTINUES at school." The influence of multiculturalism is pervasive at all levels of education, from kindergarten classrooms all the way up to college campuses across the country. Multiculturalism is synonymous with cultural/moral relativism, the idea that every "culture" is equally good and respectable, that there are no morally superior cultures or morally inferior cultures but merely a bunch of different cultures, and that there are no natural, universal standards of right and wrong.

In an English-speaking country, only 48% of Latinos aged 16-25 say they speak the language "pretty well"- and the real percentage may (gulp) be considerably lower, since they were asked to self-evaluate their English proficiency. Why do the majority of Latinos aged 16-25 not feel that becoming proficient in the English language is worthwhile and necessary? Maybe it starts with the maddening situation all of us are confronted with every time we dial an 800-number: "To hear this system in English, press 1." It's high time we stopped catering to those people who refuse to learn English.

Furthermore, if the majority of young Latinos can't even speak the language properly, how can we expect them to become self-governing citizens within our vibrant republic? Self-government requires an informed citizenry with a basic understanding of our institutions...but is someone who can't even speak the language going to have even a basic grasp of what the Constitution says? Can they truly cast an informed vote every time an election rolls around?

Few things have made me want to scream louder than some of the images I saw on TV in the midst of the heated illegal immigration debate a few years ago. There were Latinos in the streets, protesting, petitioning the government to award complete amnesty to 13 million illegal aliens...and they were waving Mexican flags. Not American flags, the country in which they were living and hoping to become a part of, but Mexican flags.

And now these numbers, that show a paltry 24% of young Latinos self-identifying as Americans first. One has to wonder: what do the percentages look like among other racial, ethnic, or religious minority groups...for example, Muslims? Nidal Hasan, years before he slaughtered 12 American soldiers, a civilian, and an unborn child, told some fellow soldiers that he considered himself a Muslim first, and an American second.

This sort of mentality, the mentality that downplays our similarities as Americans and emphasizes our differences, divides us instead of unifying us. As this nation grows more and more diverse by the day, we would do well to strive for the revival of the melting pot. National cohesion, facilitated by our shared identity as Americans first and members of other countries/cultures second, will be necessary in order to vanquish our enemies, overcome the challenges of the 21st century, and engineer yet another "new birth in freedom," wherein the United States and its government return to the founding principles of limited government and individual liberty.