Accurately, America leans melting pot, rather than an absolute one, like Brazil. Lately, I’ve read several of Americans online said that America today is no longer a melting pot but is actually an emerging salad bowl, with one citing immigrants today refuse to assimilate into the mainstream American culture.
Is this true? Is America actually shifting closer into Canada’s notion of multiculturalism (salad bowl), albeit unconsciously and unofficially?
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It’s genuinely astonishing how despite literally being right next to us, Canadians are often completely wrong about so much of our culture.
Like I don’t even know where to begin with this post.
No not at all.
Recent immigrant groups are assimilating totally fine.
The salad bowl analogy has been around for decades and is nothing new. It’s more that historians have realized the melting pot analogy doesn’t work given that there isn’t a single homogenous American culture. And the salad bowl isn’t about immigrants refusing to assimilate. It’s about how distinct cultures come to America and integrate while retaining some of their culture’s distinctiveness.
> immigrants today refuse to assimilate
First-generation immigrants have always hewed to their identities’ cultural/ethnic enclaves, with the second- and third-generations melting more and more into the American melting pot. Today is really no different than yesteryear.
This question can’t be accurately answered without going deep into US history, regional differences, ethnography and other minutiae.
But, the very broad answer, utterly lacking in sufficient context, is that you have it backwards. The US has always been a salad bowl rather than a melting pot. If you went back 200 years you would find distinct sub-cultures in different areas of the US.
> with one citing immigrants today refuse to assimilate into the mainstream American culture
No, that’s just nativist bullshit, if this were 150 years ago they’d be members of the Know Nothing party, screaming about the Irish.
No we’re still melting. If you wanna see the future of diversity in America then look at California. CA is a good 15 years ahead of the country as far as diversity goes. Experts are saying that the white population of America will be in the minority in a couple decades, well California already hit that point
They are both stupid analogies.
Life is much more complicated than that. By and large second and third generation immigrants are totally part of the general American cultural milieu while retaining family traditions, religion, cultural practices, etc. Then you also have the exportation of immigrant culture be it food, holiday traditions, whatever, into mainstream American culture.
This has been true since the beginning.
So it isn’t a salad bowl or a melting pot. It is 330 million people making individual decisions. Some communities prefer to remain unassimilated. Some explicitly try to assimilate as quickly as possible and it comes down to the individual and family level.
>Is this true? Is America actually shifting closer into Canada’s notion of multiculturalism (salad bowl), albeit unconsciously and unofficially?
lmfao
*In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.*
*Theodore Roosevelt*
*I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism. I do not speak of the hyphen when it is employed as a mere convenience, although personally, I like to avoid its use even in such manner. I speak and condemn its use whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.*
*Americanism is not a matter of creed, birthplace or national descent, but of the soul and of the spirit. If the American has the right stuff in him, I care not a snap of my fingers whether he is Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant. I care not a snap of my fingers whether his ancestors came over in the Mayflower, or whether he was born, or his parents were born, in Germany, Ireland, France, England, Scandinavia, Russia or Italy or any other country. All I ask of the immigrant is that he shall be physically and intellectually fit, of sound character, and eager in good faith to become an American citizen. If the immigrant is of the right kind I am for him, and if the native American* is of the wrong kind I am against him….*
*….Now for our own citizens. We represent many different race strains. Our ancestors came from many different Old World nationalities. It will spell ruin to this nation if these nationalities remain separated from one another instead of being assimilated to the new and larger American life.*
*The children and our children’s children of all of us have to live here in this land together. Our children’s children will intermarry, one another, your children’s children, friends, and mine. Even if they wished, they could not remain citizens of foreign countries….The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to breed a spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens.*
*Theodore Roosevelt*
If anything, interracial marriage rates & public approval for that has vastly increased, meaning there will be faster cultural mixing/melting
On the salad bowl, the way my Canadian friends smugly explain the salad bowl is fun because to my ears it’s a far less inclusive model. And then I’ve just never heard that term used by non-Canadians
“””Salad bowl””” multiculturalism has been and will always be a nothing term driven by Canada’s puerile desire to invent ways to differentiate itself from the US.
EDIT: LOOOL I remember this guy! OP is a Malaysian who spends all his time debating and lecturing Americans about American domestic politics and shit, his post history is something else, it’s quite literally all he ever talks about.
To me, the main difference between a “melting pot” and a “salad bowl” is the degree to which the mainstream culture assimilates to immigrants (not vice versa), and American mainstream culture is so adaptable that many Europeans and Asians assert it doesn’t exist.
But while it takes it’s time (Irish, Italian, Soviet, Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants had a hard row to hoe for a while), it does happen— if a culture has a holiday or food or tradition, a version of it will be mainstream within a century if enough people move here (St Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Diwali, Chinese New Year, etc,) especially if we can sell merch for it.
So, as some immigration activists put it, American culture is more about adding layers. You can keep who *you were* (as long as you share), but you just add who *we are* over that. Call it what you want to call it, but it’s worked well enough for centuries that we’re not rushing to fix it.
Still obsessed with Americans, FragWall? The US hasn’t taken the form you wish it to have yet? Get a hobby, preferably an outdoors one.
America is diverse. Some areas have no multiculturalism, others like NYC is full.
I live in the north east, cultures are celebrated, not put into a “Melting pot”. Boston has regions of the city that celebrate cultures. The south end is the Irish, the north end is the Italian, East Boston is a lot of Vietnamese and Cambodian, etc., Boston has a China town. People like to go to those areas to try cuisines, etc
Working in Boston I’ve worked with a ton of second generation Americans. Aside from food culture and their family cultures, they are literally no different than any other American.
This is just another instance of a younger generation that has to find fault with *everything* that came before, and searching for racism under every rock.
Also a fetishization of diversity and the preservation of heritage identities that, it has been pointed out before, starts looking creepily like racism in the name of the cause of anti racism.
The melting pot analogy was always perfect because it recognizes that a multicultural society will, if its people embrace each other, blend. Intolerance keeps us separate, and separation makes us weak (remember “a house divided anyone?). Embracing each other will unify us, and together we create something new.
The idea of fusion is, I get it, more anxiety-causing to minority groups, because if we become an average of the sum of our parts, then the majority becomes the dominant “flavor.”
But that’s a childishly simplistic way if looking at cultural fusion. It neglects the fact that people are *intelligent actors*, and we don’t culturally meld by simply moving towards a mean. We can choose the best from what everyone brings to the table. Because we aren’t a dumb herd of animals, we are a group of conscious beings making independent choices.
A melting pot, to go back to the vehicle of the metaphor, does not alchemically transmute all substances put into it, into the majority substance. When you add a small amount of carbon to iron, you don’t get a slightly greater amount of iron. *You get steel*.
Any analogy is going to have its shortcomings, but the thing about assimilation is that it’s not a one-and-done process. It takes place over two or more generations. Immigrants typically stay within their cultural group, their children are exposed to the mainstream and drift further from the safety of their heritage enclave. So the process happens, it’s just not something that happens in the course of a day
New comers always retained their culture with the exception of adapting to US laws, infrastructure, ways to make a living, and learning to co-exist with people outside of their culture. That’s the assimilation for them. Always been that way. They tend to live in neighborhood enclaves with others from the same country living within that ethnic community and support each other. To me that’s the quilted patch of the American melting pot.
Now when they start having kids growing up in the country gets interesting. Each person with immigrants parents born here has a unique experience, perspective and ultimately different road to their journey of who they are as “whatever-American”.
A lot of this depends on how strong the family ties are, religion, skin color, how they were treated and looked at by media and peers etc. Some are obvious hybrids with stronger ties to their parents culture with native English speaking skills. Some want to reject their parent’s culture altogether and try to fit in to the mainstream. Some will identify more with wherever in the US they grew up for example, its not uncommon to find asians with assimilated black/hispanic identities to a degree. And others are just confused.
American mainstream is constantly changing though thanks to the culture wars where taboos and traditions are constantly challenged. Its definitely changed since the 70s/80s/90s. While immigrant newcomers will always retain who they are, the children and the generations after that will blend but always become part of that variable change in America
I remember the word “stew” being used instead of “salad bowl”. But the concept has been around for a long time.
The melting pot was never really a perfect depiction. Actual American history is a lot messier than that. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying a complex issue, immigrant communities stay less assimilated for a generation or two, then the third generation largely reflects the local culture.
Most of the immigrants I know are navigating what aspects of their culture of origin they really want to pass on to their kids and in which ways they’d like their kids to be more “American” so that they can have more economic opportunities (usually by being fluent in English). Those are the same calculations my ancestors made. I don’t think it’s changed as much as we think.
Certainly not true for everyone, but given that I have family members from five different continents, my own experience tends towards the melting pot side of things rather than the salad bowl.
>with one citing immigrants today refuse to assimilate into the mainstream American culture.
Get off of Parlor.
Neither a melting pot nor a salad. We’re a chunky soup.
You may be a potato or a carrot at your core, but you’ve also been saturated with that loose generalized American broth.
The salad bowl/mosaic vs meltng pot thing just seems like other countries trying to be like “psh we’re not like America at all!”.
The US has long had a history of immigration and immigrant communities retaining a good amount of their culture. I think the difference in some countries is that the populations are so heavily concentrated in a few areas that these immigrant communities tend to stay together. Whereas like the Irish here in the US have spread out so far and wide.
Now yes there are still Irish communities around, particularly in the New England and the Northeast. But for someone like me, growing up in the Midwest, about the only Irish culture that was part of my life was growing up Catholic and my middle name (McNally), named after a distant relative who was a Catholic Priest. Besides that, I didn’t grow up eating traditionally Irish food, or knowing or being immersed in that culture. Hell, I’ve never even been to Ireland. I think I have to go back 6 or more generations to get to a relative who actually was raised in Ireland.
But that’s not true for everyone. We’ve got a lot of communities who retain a lot of their culture here, even several generations in.
What’s supposed to happen after intermarriage?
My paternal grandfather of Filipino and Chinese descent, born in the Philippines
My paternal grandmother of ‘German’ descent, born in USA. (Her parents immigrated from what is current day Russia but they were German)
I know less about my biological maternal grandparents because my mother was adopted. They are of Native American and Filipino descent. Born in the USA.
My nieces and nephews are: “Native American, Filipino, Chinese, and German”+”whatever my sibling-inlaws are”
How many posts about this can wr get in a week?
The salad model has always been more accurate for the US. Canada actually is more melting pot that the US is (looking at your language and secularism laws Quebec).
We’ve always been a salad bowl. The melting pot analogy less about the immigrants and more about American culture as a whole.
There is evidence all over the place we’ve been a “salad bowl” for centuries. That’s why we call our first year of school “kindergarten” like Germans instead of “reception” like the English (you know, where our language comes from.) That’s why millions of Italian immigrants created what’s called “Italian food” that is so different from food in Italy. The same applies to Chinese immigrants.
Then there are things like the Easter Bunny (German origins), Santa Claus (a mixture of British and Dutch folklore), the tooth fairy (Nordic origins), trick or treating (immigrants took it to Canada, who brought it to us).
The melting pot isn’t because everyone confirms to some arbitrary standard. We’re a melting pot because all of these immigrants with their heritage and traditions make up our overall culture. When an object melts, it doesn’t cease to exist. It mixes with the other melted objects.
Personally I’ve always seen America as a big ol’ tossed salad.
In fact, there is nothing more American than tossing salad!
> I’ve read several of Americans online said that America today is no longer a melting pot but is actually an emerging salad bowl, with one citing immigrants today refuse to assimilate into the mainstream American culture. Whoever is saying that, is
Whoever is saying that is full of nonsense.
Claiming that immigrants now are refusing to assimilate into our society has long been the cry of the racist. Every immigrant group that came to the US was met with a few racist people saying they weren’t integrating into America. They said that about the Irish, about the Germans, about the Italians, about the Chinese. . .but ultimately they all integrated well into American society.
Integration of immigrant groups is a long process, that takes a few generations.