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UP OR OUT
Most Americans, both those who favor and those
who oppose assimilation, believe that for immi-
grants to assimilate, they must abandon their origi-
nal cultural attributes and conform entirely to the
behaviors and customs of the majority of the native-
born population. In the terminology of the armed
forces, this represents a model of “up or out”: Either
immigrants bring themselves “up” to native cultural
standards, or they are doomed to live “out” of the
charmed circle of the national culture.
MELTI NG POT
“Here shall they all unite to build the Re-
public of Man and the Kingdom of God.”
In America, however, assimilation has not meant repudiating
immigrant culture. Assimilation, American style has always
been much more flexible and accommodating and, consequent-
ly, much more effective in achieving its purpose—to allow the
United States to preserve its “national unity in the face of the
influx of hordes of persons of scores of different nationalities,”
in the words of the sociologist Henry Fairchild.
BEYOND THE
MELTI NG POT
Critics of the metaphor have spanned the ideological spectrum and
mounted several different lines of attack on it. Empiricists submit-
ted evidence that the melting pot wasn’t working as predicted and
concluded, as did Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in
Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), “The point about the melting pot...is
that it did not happen.” Other critics rejected the second corollary
of the metaphor—that natives were changed by it, too—and saw no
reason that native Americans should give up any part of their cul-
tural attributes to “melt” into the alloy. If true assimilation were to
occur, the criticism went, immigrants would have to abandon all their
cultural baggage and conform to American ways. It is the immigrant,
said Fairchild, representing the views of many Americans, “who must
undergo the entire transformation; the true member of the American
nationality is not called upon to change in the least.”
CULTURAL
PLURA L I SM
Cultural pluralism rejects melting-pot assimilationism not on em-
pirical grounds, but on ideological ones. Kallen and his followers
believed that immigrants to the United States should not “melt”
into a common national ethnic alloy but, rather, should steadfastly
hang on to their cultural ethnicity and band together for social and
political purposes even after generations of residence in the United
States. As such, cultural pluralism is not an alternative theory of
assimilation; it is a theory opposed to assimilation.
BEYOND THE
arrangement, raised to the nth power. Viewing ethnic Americans
as members of a federation rather than a union, ethnic federal-
ism, a.k.a. multiculturalism, asserts that ethnic Americans have
the right to proportional representation in matters of power and
privilege, the right to demand that their “native” culture and puta-
tive ethnic ancestors be accorded recognition and respect, and the
right to function in their “native” language (even if it is not the lan-
guage of their birth or they never learned to speak it), not just at
home but in the public realm.
A CRO SS THE
IDEOLOGI CAL
SPECTRUM
While all these metaphors—including the melting pot—are
colorful ways of representing assimilation, they don’t go far
in giving one an accurate understanding of what assimila-
tion is really about. For example, across the ideological
spectrum, they all invoke some external, impersonal as-
similating agent. Who, exactly, is the “great alchemist” of the
melting pot? What force tosses the salad or pieces together
the mosaic? By picturing assimilation as an impersonal, au-
tomatic process and thus placing it beyond analysis, the
metaphors fail to illuminate its most important secrets. As-
similation, if it is to succeed, must be a voluntary process,
by both the assimilating immigrants and the assimilated-to
natives. Assimilation is a human accommodation, not a me-
chanical production.