Righting History: The Myth of the Melting Pot

         It’s a remarkable contradiction. The melting pot metaphor assumes positive significance for American society in the very period (i.e., 1900-1924) that the nation is zealously excluding almost everyone on earth.

    Israel Zangwill’s play opened on Broadway in 1909 and it quickly provided a metaphor that glorified America. The main character, a Russian immigrant, celebrates his new home by pointing to the Statue of Liberty; with her magnificent torch she exemplifies a nation whose glory rests on welcoming “all nations who come to labor and look forward.” Meanwhile, in one case after another, the U.S. courts get rid of anyone who is not white. Chinese and Japanese, Indians and Africans, Syrians and Moroccans: America was an equal opportunity excluder of anyone who did not fit into the white category.

  In 1924, when the melting pot myth is well on its way to becoming a part of the nation’s conventional wisdom, Congress passes the most exclusionary legislation in U.S. history. The quota for so called Asians was a resounding zero. An entire continent is labeled nonwhite as politicians pass legislation with these results: Between 1924 and 1965, close to 65% of America’s legal immigrants came from three nations, England, Ireland, and Germany.

     The idea was to replenish the nation’s supply of good seed immigrants. With a fresh whitewashing of the genetic pool, America could eliminate whatever contamination occurred as a result of contact with people as incapable of assimilation as the Chinese and the Japanese. So, even when China became a U.S. ally during World War II, the number of allowable legal immigrants was increased from zero to 100 persons a year.

    Despite the realities of history, the melting pot myth lives on, right into the twenty-first century. It must be challenged because it is horrendous history; and because of what happens when immigrants melt into the American mainstream. As David R. Roetinger reminds us in Working toward Whiteness ethnic groups like the Italians, Portuguese and Greeks were initially suspect. They were, as Zangwill called Sicilians, “dark whites” and it took more than two generations for their full assimilation into the white majority.

     That could happen again. After 1965, the United States dramatically changed its immigration laws. Thanks to years of lobbying by, among others, Chinese and Japanese Americans, the United States opened its doors to the entire world. Everyone was welcome but, as the Kennedy staff privately assured Congress, few Asians or Indians would ever accept America’s invitation. Thus, we could claim to be prejudice free without having to ever worry about intimate contact with most of the people on earth.

   Despite the assurances Congress received, the world came. And America had no idea what to do with millions of Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, Indian and Arab Americans. The black/white dichotomy remained the essential tool for positive or negative classification but, somehow, it did not fit for many of the nation’s post 1965 immigrants. Thus, Indians were often darker than African Americans but they never received the black designation. White was also out of the question so many immigrants remained, with Peter Pan, in “never never land”. They were none of the above and simultaneously, people of color or nonwhite.

   My concern is what may happen if we do not take advantage of our present situation. However painfully, none of the above immigrants remind us what actually happened in U.S. society; and, in addition, they explode our way of thinking about race and ethnicity. For example, many Jamaicans did not know they were black until they arrived at JFK. So, perhaps the problem is ours rather than theirs; indeed, if Jamaicans –and many other West Indians- learned to make ethnicity rather than skin color a national axis of identity, why can’t we?

   Real change is possible. But so is a hypocritical repetition of history.  In 2008 California, Mexicans have been known to jokingly bow down before Japanese Americans because they are the “new whites”. Despised for most of our history, Japanese Americans are now a “model minority” who could, over time, become as white as the Sicilians. Meanwhile, in the 1990’s Arab Americans argued that they needed a separate minority status. Neither white nor black, they were invisible. But not anymore! In the 2000 Census the Bureau decided that anyone from North Africa is white. At least in the nation’s capitol, Arab Americans are not people of color, but, instead, full blooded white people.

       In time millions of Latinos could follow the Florida Cubans who also receive or embrace the white designator. So, what do we want? Serious change or, in 2050, more whites, more blacks (e.g., the West Indians, the Africans, the Haitians), and more people of color (i.e., Indians and Pakistanis) than ever before.

    My argument is that we must right history, undermine the legitimacy of the white/black dichotomy and then radically reconfigure the society in a manner that fits in with the best traditions of Sociology. As Emile Durkheim stressed, “societies can have their pride, not in being the greatest or the wealthiest, but in being the most just, the best organized and in possessing the best moral constitution.”