Another look at America as melting pot
Maybe not so bad after all?
Maybe not so bad after all?
by Polo Catalani
For as long as many of us have been earning our keep in America, most of us advocating for immigrant communities have
insisted that our strength and our elegance in this chaotic new country depends on our continuing cultural integrity. Our
dislocated families’ health and happiness depend, we’ve insisted, on our ancient traditions.
To be sure, we’ve been a bit selective about what old cultural stuff is cool (like respect for elders), and what is not (like
clobbering women). But on the whole, our approach has been conservative, not assimilative. We’ve been ethnic enclavers,
not mainstreamers. In short: Knock off the melting pot nonsense. We’re going to do this Yankee Doodle Dandy thing our way.
The London subway bombings may have jarred that sense of certainty. A shift in thinking may be on the table. The melting
pot as social policy suddenly seems not as bad as all that, after all.
The American back story
Before beginning this rather radical review, a small bite of U.S. history is in order. Scholars and public policy types can
take a deep breath: This is not social science. This is an 800-word inquiry, and I’ve already squandered 200 of them. Ándale,
dudes.
America as a social experiment is about 300 years old. Everyone knows that in order to grow a healthy nation from its
beginnings, the political leaders and societal followers must be well-off. Successful states must be wealthy. America got a
good start with free land and free labor. Our rich, rich soil we took from native peoples; our early institutional wealth we got
from African slaves. They either got in the pot or got hurt. Real bad.
About 150 years later, wealthy Yank industrialists needed a lot of hungry laborers. Hundreds of thousands of them. Lucky for
everybody, famines and joblessness in Poland, Ireland, and Italy provided plenty of eager workers ready to give up everything
to get over here and get a job. Francesco de Martinelli sold everything for a steamer ticket. At Ellis Island he was reduced to
Frank Martin. Frankie gave up being much of a family man by doing 12-hour sweaty shifts six days a week. The factory ground
him down. In pretty short order, Big Frank surrendered his beloved Sicilian soul.
Dislocated families get disconnected from their home cultures. We become detached from our ancestors, then from our
elders. These discontinuities set us existentially adrift. This is bad for people, great for production. It hurts.
But who has time to notice?
We work real hard. Ask anyone vacationing here from our immigrant sending-countries – folks from Western Europe or
South America or East Asia, all the same – and they’ll tell you ,“Jeez, you guys work a lot.” Sure we do. A stressed-out peeps,
we are. Uh-huh.
We have melted down. America is a hot pot, and we get mushy. We make a trade: We must. In exchange for spiritual
reverence, for our elder’s moral authority, for our elegant manners, we get wealth. Lots of it.
Sure, we have to work and work and work to get our wealth of stuff. To keep it and to keep up. But it keeps the whole
American enterprise pretty stable. Of course, we have people who just don’t get it – heck, we have entire ethnic minority
communities which simply can’t. But they get drugs, gambling, and MTV. Working or not, our marginalized folk have cable,
cell phones, Air Jordans.
The European experience
Compare all this to the immigrant experience in the European Union. The Pakistan-born bomber of London’s subway, the
murderer of Amsterdam filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the terrorists behind Madrid’s train tragedies (Moroccan émigrés all)
did not get the hot pot. They did not melt. They remained, indeed, very raw.
Western European tolerance for ethnic and cultural diversity, I’m embarrassed to suggest, may net a culturally angrier and
ideologically more active ethnic minority male. Work-work-work, it seems, of the kind necessary for the American economic
dream machine, not only makes our elites richer while making our families relatively wealthier (remember when we were
happy with a $200 TV?) – it also makes us men much more docile. Dang, no one has the time to get all itchy and political.
Come the weekend, I’ve got barely enough testosterone left for NBA on ESPN, while the wife’s out at the mall.
America is exhausting. No one I know has the energy to get juiced up about what’s happening to our sacred places (The Holy
Land, Bali, and soon Lhasa), about the sale of our sisters and daughters (in Bangkok, Kiev, or Rio), not even about the violent
neglect of our skinny little brown kids (in Manila, Raffah, or Calcutta).
It’s not that we don’t know we should ache for the first, feel shame about the second, and cry quietly late at night for the
third – it’s just that I’m too tired to feel human, too compromised to think straight, and too complicit to act right.
Whew. Melted into an American stew, I am.
Ronault ‘Polo’ Catalani is a lawyer, writer, and activist. He is a law partner with Community Legal Services in Madison and
specializes in immigration issues. He can be reached at commlegalserv@aol.com.
For as long as many of us have been earning our keep in America, most of us advocating for immigrant communities have
insisted that our strength and our elegance in this chaotic new country depends on our continuing cultural integrity. Our
dislocated families’ health and happiness depend, we’ve insisted, on our ancient traditions.
To be sure, we’ve been a bit selective about what old cultural stuff is cool (like respect for elders), and what is not (like
clobbering women). But on the whole, our approach has been conservative, not assimilative. We’ve been ethnic enclavers,
not mainstreamers. In short: Knock off the melting pot nonsense. We’re going to do this Yankee Doodle Dandy thing our way.
The London subway bombings may have jarred that sense of certainty. A shift in thinking may be on the table. The melting
pot as social policy suddenly seems not as bad as all that, after all.
The American back story
Before beginning this rather radical review, a small bite of U.S. history is in order. Scholars and public policy types can
take a deep breath: This is not social science. This is an 800-word inquiry, and I’ve already squandered 200 of them. Ándale,
dudes.
America as a social experiment is about 300 years old. Everyone knows that in order to grow a healthy nation from its
beginnings, the political leaders and societal followers must be well-off. Successful states must be wealthy. America got a
good start with free land and free labor. Our rich, rich soil we took from native peoples; our early institutional wealth we got
from African slaves. They either got in the pot or got hurt. Real bad.
About 150 years later, wealthy Yank industrialists needed a lot of hungry laborers. Hundreds of thousands of them. Lucky for
everybody, famines and joblessness in Poland, Ireland, and Italy provided plenty of eager workers ready to give up everything
to get over here and get a job. Francesco de Martinelli sold everything for a steamer ticket. At Ellis Island he was reduced to
Frank Martin. Frankie gave up being much of a family man by doing 12-hour sweaty shifts six days a week. The factory ground
him down. In pretty short order, Big Frank surrendered his beloved Sicilian soul.
Dislocated families get disconnected from their home cultures. We become detached from our ancestors, then from our
elders. These discontinuities set us existentially adrift. This is bad for people, great for production. It hurts.
But who has time to notice?
We work real hard. Ask anyone vacationing here from our immigrant sending-countries – folks from Western Europe or
South America or East Asia, all the same – and they’ll tell you ,“Jeez, you guys work a lot.” Sure we do. A stressed-out peeps,
we are. Uh-huh.
We have melted down. America is a hot pot, and we get mushy. We make a trade: We must. In exchange for spiritual
reverence, for our elder’s moral authority, for our elegant manners, we get wealth. Lots of it.
Sure, we have to work and work and work to get our wealth of stuff. To keep it and to keep up. But it keeps the whole
American enterprise pretty stable. Of course, we have people who just don’t get it – heck, we have entire ethnic minority
communities which simply can’t. But they get drugs, gambling, and MTV. Working or not, our marginalized folk have cable,
cell phones, Air Jordans.
The European experience
Compare all this to the immigrant experience in the European Union. The Pakistan-born bomber of London’s subway, the
murderer of Amsterdam filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the terrorists behind Madrid’s train tragedies (Moroccan émigrés all)
did not get the hot pot. They did not melt. They remained, indeed, very raw.
Western European tolerance for ethnic and cultural diversity, I’m embarrassed to suggest, may net a culturally angrier and
ideologically more active ethnic minority male. Work-work-work, it seems, of the kind necessary for the American economic
dream machine, not only makes our elites richer while making our families relatively wealthier (remember when we were
happy with a $200 TV?) – it also makes us men much more docile. Dang, no one has the time to get all itchy and political.
Come the weekend, I’ve got barely enough testosterone left for NBA on ESPN, while the wife’s out at the mall.
America is exhausting. No one I know has the energy to get juiced up about what’s happening to our sacred places (The Holy
Land, Bali, and soon Lhasa), about the sale of our sisters and daughters (in Bangkok, Kiev, or Rio), not even about the violent
neglect of our skinny little brown kids (in Manila, Raffah, or Calcutta).
It’s not that we don’t know we should ache for the first, feel shame about the second, and cry quietly late at night for the
third – it’s just that I’m too tired to feel human, too compromised to think straight, and too complicit to act right.
Whew. Melted into an American stew, I am.
Ronault ‘Polo’ Catalani is a lawyer, writer, and activist. He is a law partner with Community Legal Services in Madison and
specializes in immigration issues. He can be reached at commlegalserv@aol.com.