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This just makes me sad. We seem to be returning to a segregated society with separate services for every ethnic group. It’s not the “melting pot” idea of Americ

This just makes me sad. We seem to be returning to a segregated society with separate services for every ethnic group. It’s not the “melting pot” idea of America that I was raised with, where everyone contributes their own unique culture to a unified American whole. That was the brilliance of American identity, which is now fracturing at an accelerated rate.

recroad 5y ago
It was never a melting point. It was always a mixed salad.
- disneygibson 5y ago
  The concept of “white” is a consequence of the melting pot idea. I had hoped that eventually we could expand from White/European American to just American, a broad identity not based on race at all. This would have solved the injustices of the past and built a more cohesive American identity. Instead we seem to be going backwards. 2050 New York City might look more like 1900 than 2000.
  - KittenInABox 5y ago
    The concept of "white" is not a consequence of the melting pot idea. The concept of "white" was explicitly born as a way to justify enslaving and treating a group of people as property for generations. If one wants to solve the injustices of the past, its important to actually acknowledge the reality of those injustices and how they feed into modern day. The "melting pot" theory I suspect was always a form of injustice in of itself, because it expected people to simply forget what happened to them and accept that they'll never get an apology have amends made for them.
    - disneygibson 5y ago
      Most “white” people in America today were not considered so 100-150 years ago. Irish, Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Levantine Arabs, and pretty much everyone other than English, Germans and French. My point is that this identity was expanded to be inclusive in order to build social cohesion. That was a good thing, but now let’s rename it to just “American” and include all ethnic groups, instead of going backwards.
      - quantum_solanum 5y ago
        > "[white] identity was expanded to be inclusive in order to build social cohesion. That was a good thing.." Social cohesion largely as a means of sharpening anti-Blackness and of labor control, particularly during and after the defeat of Reconstruction and due to growing relevance of the industrial organized labor movement. Du Bois did an immense amount of work critiquing pretty much exactly this.
        disneygibson 5y ago
        The entire history of cultures becoming Americanized was not purely an anti-black project. The history of Jews in America is a good example and they were subject to Ivy League quotas well after WW2.
      - KittenInABox 5y ago
        Most "white" people in America today were never treated like property the way black people have been in america for generations. Most "white" people in America have never dealt with the degree of dehumanization that occurred to black people in America. The degree of what has happened to black people in America is overwhelmingly moreso than any other race save for Native Americans. It's extremely important to acknowledge that the barriers to social cohesion for certain races are significantly higher than others. We are in living memory where black children had to be accompanied by the military for their protection because they dared attend the same school as white people.
        disneygibson 5y ago
        I didn’t say it would be as easy for everyone. Just that this is a better route (melting pot) than a return to separatism. I’m struggling to see how your comment relates to what I’m saying.
      - plehoux 5y ago
        French-Canadian were too considered like most other catholics as different and undesirable : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_in_Maine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_in_Maine
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    FYI in 1900 it was illegal for Black folk to occupy the same commercial spaces as European Americans, and were relegated to designated areas in many public spaces, and that wasn't because Black folk wanted to, or imposed that law. Your "melting pot" interpretation concretely just means "they should not be different or receive different things than me".
    - disneygibson 5y ago
      Your "melting pot" interpretation concretely just means "they should not be different or receive different things than me" No, it doesn’t, and that makes no sense. The melting pot idea means that everyone works toward a cohesive national identity and recognizes contributions from everyone. It doesn’t mean that every group should be separate and excluded from each other.
      - imbnwa 5y ago
        Separate and excluded? Bruh, they're not requiring photo identification on sign-up as proof of Blackness, LMAO, lotta people in this thread are reaching for them grapes. I hope you sign-up, maybe you'll like some of the content. Lemme ask you another question since we're asking silly questions: should Telemundo and Univision be illegal to broadcast in the US because its not in English (cohesive national identity, right?)? Cause that's what you sound like.
        disneygibson 5y ago
        Who said anything about it being illegal? You are being sarcastic and not engaging in good faith.
        imbnwa 5y ago
        > Who said anything about it being illegal? Sure, lets deescalate: are their broadcasting in America and commensurate content choices discriminatory or working against a cohesive national identity? > You are being sarcastic and not engaging in good faith. But I find the last bit ironic
rchaud 5y ago
Can you provide a definition for the 'melting pot' idea that you were raised with?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  The first paragraph defines it well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_pot
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Thanks for the link. It seems like the melting pot idea is old enough that it's defined in the same narrow way that "all men are created equal" was in the Constitution. American multiculturalism up until WW2 was English, Scottish, Irish, French, Italian, Jewish and Greek. Strictly European, yet still featured plenty of discrimination within those tiers. The discrimination didn't end because people magically became more enlightened, it ended (or at least was greatly reduced) when the marginalized groups assimilated into a more homogenous "American" identity, which defaults to 'white'. It's not clear where non-Europeans fall into this melting pot concept, because most are not racially ambiguous and cannot claim to be white. Most scripts will not have a protagonist of a specific race. But in casting, it will simply be assumed that the character in question is white. Because melting pot or not, that's what everybody's default is.
raclage 5y ago
> It’s not the “melting pot” idea of America that I was raised with, where everyone contributes their own unique culture to a unified American whole. Then I don't understand why your response to someone trying to create a platform to express their culture strikes you as "Fracturing."
- disneygibson 5y ago
  Because it’s encouraging separatism. I would much rather have a startup that promotes black creators to the broader culture than one exclusionary by design. Looking at top musicians, artists, and other cultural figures, it seems to me like this is already largely the case. Hip hop sales come in large part from white people. I want more of this cultural sharing, not isolationism.
  - raclage 5y ago
    I didn't really see anything in the design I saw as exclusionary! > because we appreciate the HN community taking time to hear our story, for a short period of time, we’re making some of our original black TV shows available for free on our site Like thousands of business before them they're marketing to an audience but it seems like they're more than happy to build a broader audience.
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    It's not cultural sharing now, it's appropriation. See also the endless monologues about dreadlocks.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      Remember that twitter isn't real life. For every college freshmen tweeting about the sushi counter being cultural appropriation, 98% of people disagree. Just because someone is loud and inflammatory does not mean their views are widely held.
      - at_a_remove 5y ago
itisit 5y ago
Separate but equal
endisneigh 5y ago
The lie you’ve been fed is that America was ever integrated.
- disneygibson 5y ago
  The melting pot is a goal and a living idea, not an idealized time in the past. And yes, groups of white Americans that were hostile to each other a century ago are now so integrated that it’s not even thought about. An Italian Catholic marrying a German Protestant was a huge deal in 1900. Today it is nothing.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Your example of European immigrants is noted but isn’t really relevant to the racial tensions between Blacks and Whites.
  - jxramos 5y ago
    interesting, so by analogy just as as those disparate groups got subsumed into a larger one in some rough identity integration thing so too we would hope to further widen that group to join with other groups to subsume everything under the sun where group divisions are no longer even perceived. The whole "just one race" sort of thing I'm imagining.
    - disneygibson 5y ago
      I think that is probably the best outcome for the US, if it wants to remain as a unified state for a long time. If not, then separatism eventually leads to a divorce. It’s happened before in world history, it can certainly happen again.
yaacov 5y ago
Black people mostly aren’t immigrants and it’s not fair to demand that they assimilate if they don’t want to. America forcibly enslaved black people for hundreds of years, then excluded them from our society and political process for a few generations, it’s not surprising that they developed their own culture.
- disneygibson 5y ago
  Assimilation implies giving up your culture for a new one. That isn’t the melting pot idea, which is about giving and taking. Otherwise I don’t really get the solution. Don’t try to integrate different cultures, thereby continuing to exclude them?
spicymaki 5y ago
To be honest America is still pretty segregated and always has been. Neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, literature, theaters, and religious institutions are segregated. Black people are still being harassed or worse for being in the "wrong place" at the wrong time. I assure you whatever racist events you hear in the media is just the tip of the iceberg. I grew up in one of the most racially and culturally diverse places in the US "a true melting pot" and the neighborhoods were still segregated by race and ethnicity. The cultural contributions you are talking about are mostly selections made by white tastemakers who vet who and what is fashionable for the time. Sometimes to improve marketability they will replace minorities to make the material palatable. The only thing that matters in America is equity (ownership not fairness). In order for black people to have equity they need to own it.
PepeLa 5y ago
> It’s not the “melting pot” idea of America that I was raised with I remember that song from Schoolhouse Rock too. But if as an adult you sincerely believe the US has actually been a "melting pot" at any point in history, you are deeply misinformed. What about Native American genocide, slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, redlining, or mass incarceration sounds like a "melting pot" to you?

recroad 5y ago

It was never a melting point. It was always a mixed salad.

disneygibson 5y ago
The concept of “white” is a consequence of the melting pot idea. I had hoped that eventually we could expand from White/European American to just American, a broad identity not based on race at all. This would have solved the injustices of the past and built a more cohesive American identity. Instead we seem to be going backwards. 2050 New York City might look more like 1900 than 2000.
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  The concept of "white" is not a consequence of the melting pot idea. The concept of "white" was explicitly born as a way to justify enslaving and treating a group of people as property for generations. If one wants to solve the injustices of the past, its important to actually acknowledge the reality of those injustices and how they feed into modern day. The "melting pot" theory I suspect was always a form of injustice in of itself, because it expected people to simply forget what happened to them and accept that they'll never get an apology have amends made for them.
  - disneygibson 5y ago
    Most “white” people in America today were not considered so 100-150 years ago. Irish, Slavs, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Jews, Levantine Arabs, and pretty much everyone other than English, Germans and French. My point is that this identity was expanded to be inclusive in order to build social cohesion. That was a good thing, but now let’s rename it to just “American” and include all ethnic groups, instead of going backwards.
    - quantum_solanum 5y ago
      > "[white] identity was expanded to be inclusive in order to build social cohesion. That was a good thing.." Social cohesion largely as a means of sharpening anti-Blackness and of labor control, particularly during and after the defeat of Reconstruction and due to growing relevance of the industrial organized labor movement. Du Bois did an immense amount of work critiquing pretty much exactly this.
      - disneygibson 5y ago
        The entire history of cultures becoming Americanized was not purely an anti-black project. The history of Jews in America is a good example and they were subject to Ivy League quotas well after WW2.
    - KittenInABox 5y ago
      Most "white" people in America today were never treated like property the way black people have been in america for generations. Most "white" people in America have never dealt with the degree of dehumanization that occurred to black people in America. The degree of what has happened to black people in America is overwhelmingly moreso than any other race save for Native Americans. It's extremely important to acknowledge that the barriers to social cohesion for certain races are significantly higher than others. We are in living memory where black children had to be accompanied by the military for their protection because they dared attend the same school as white people.
      - disneygibson 5y ago
        I didn’t say it would be as easy for everyone. Just that this is a better route (melting pot) than a return to separatism. I’m struggling to see how your comment relates to what I’m saying.
    - plehoux 5y ago
      French-Canadian were too considered like most other catholics as different and undesirable : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_in_Maine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_in_Maine
- imbnwa 5y ago
  FYI in 1900 it was illegal for Black folk to occupy the same commercial spaces as European Americans, and were relegated to designated areas in many public spaces, and that wasn't because Black folk wanted to, or imposed that law. Your "melting pot" interpretation concretely just means "they should not be different or receive different things than me".
  - disneygibson 5y ago
    Your "melting pot" interpretation concretely just means "they should not be different or receive different things than me" No, it doesn’t, and that makes no sense. The melting pot idea means that everyone works toward a cohesive national identity and recognizes contributions from everyone. It doesn’t mean that every group should be separate and excluded from each other.
    - imbnwa 5y ago
      Separate and excluded? Bruh, they're not requiring photo identification on sign-up as proof of Blackness, LMAO, lotta people in this thread are reaching for them grapes. I hope you sign-up, maybe you'll like some of the content. Lemme ask you another question since we're asking silly questions: should Telemundo and Univision be illegal to broadcast in the US because its not in English (cohesive national identity, right?)? Cause that's what you sound like.
      - disneygibson 5y ago
        Who said anything about it being illegal? You are being sarcastic and not engaging in good faith.
        imbnwa 5y ago
        > Who said anything about it being illegal? Sure, lets deescalate: are their broadcasting in America and commensurate content choices discriminatory or working against a cohesive national identity? > You are being sarcastic and not engaging in good faith. But I find the last bit ironic

rchaud 5y ago

Can you provide a definition for the 'melting pot' idea that you were raised with?

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
The first paragraph defines it well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_pot
- rchaud 5y ago
  Thanks for the link. It seems like the melting pot idea is old enough that it's defined in the same narrow way that "all men are created equal" was in the Constitution. American multiculturalism up until WW2 was English, Scottish, Irish, French, Italian, Jewish and Greek. Strictly European, yet still featured plenty of discrimination within those tiers. The discrimination didn't end because people magically became more enlightened, it ended (or at least was greatly reduced) when the marginalized groups assimilated into a more homogenous "American" identity, which defaults to 'white'. It's not clear where non-Europeans fall into this melting pot concept, because most are not racially ambiguous and cannot claim to be white. Most scripts will not have a protagonist of a specific race. But in casting, it will simply be assumed that the character in question is white. Because melting pot or not, that's what everybody's default is.

raclage 5y ago

> It’s not the “melting pot” idea of America that I was raised with, where everyone contributes their own unique culture to a unified American whole. Then I don't understand why your response to someone trying to create a platform to express their culture strikes you as "Fracturing."

disneygibson 5y ago
Because it’s encouraging separatism. I would much rather have a startup that promotes black creators to the broader culture than one exclusionary by design. Looking at top musicians, artists, and other cultural figures, it seems to me like this is already largely the case. Hip hop sales come in large part from white people. I want more of this cultural sharing, not isolationism.
- raclage 5y ago
  I didn't really see anything in the design I saw as exclusionary! > because we appreciate the HN community taking time to hear our story, for a short period of time, we’re making some of our original black TV shows available for free on our site Like thousands of business before them they're marketing to an audience but it seems like they're more than happy to build a broader audience.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  It's not cultural sharing now, it's appropriation. See also the endless monologues about dreadlocks.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    Remember that twitter isn't real life. For every college freshmen tweeting about the sushi counter being cultural appropriation, 98% of people disagree. Just because someone is loud and inflammatory does not mean their views are widely held.
    - at_a_remove 5y ago

itisit 5y ago

Separate but equal

endisneigh 5y ago

The lie you’ve been fed is that America was ever integrated.

disneygibson 5y ago
The melting pot is a goal and a living idea, not an idealized time in the past. And yes, groups of white Americans that were hostile to each other a century ago are now so integrated that it’s not even thought about. An Italian Catholic marrying a German Protestant was a huge deal in 1900. Today it is nothing.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Your example of European immigrants is noted but isn’t really relevant to the racial tensions between Blacks and Whites.
- jxramos 5y ago
  interesting, so by analogy just as as those disparate groups got subsumed into a larger one in some rough identity integration thing so too we would hope to further widen that group to join with other groups to subsume everything under the sun where group divisions are no longer even perceived. The whole "just one race" sort of thing I'm imagining.
  - disneygibson 5y ago
    I think that is probably the best outcome for the US, if it wants to remain as a unified state for a long time. If not, then separatism eventually leads to a divorce. It’s happened before in world history, it can certainly happen again.

yaacov 5y ago

Black people mostly aren’t immigrants and it’s not fair to demand that they assimilate if they don’t want to. America forcibly enslaved black people for hundreds of years, then excluded them from our society and political process for a few generations, it’s not surprising that they developed their own culture.

disneygibson 5y ago
Assimilation implies giving up your culture for a new one. That isn’t the melting pot idea, which is about giving and taking. Otherwise I don’t really get the solution. Don’t try to integrate different cultures, thereby continuing to exclude them?

spicymaki 5y ago

To be honest America is still pretty segregated and always has been. Neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, literature, theaters, and religious institutions are segregated. Black people are still being harassed or worse for being in the "wrong place" at the wrong time. I assure you whatever racist events you hear in the media is just the tip of the iceberg. I grew up in one of the most racially and culturally diverse places in the US "a true melting pot" and the neighborhoods were still segregated by race and ethnicity. The cultural contributions you are talking about are mostly selections made by white tastemakers who vet who and what is fashionable for the time. Sometimes to improve marketability they will replace minorities to make the material palatable. The only thing that matters in America is equity (ownership not fairness). In order for black people to have equity they need to own it.

PepeLa 5y ago

> It’s not the “melting pot” idea of America that I was raised with I remember that song from Schoolhouse Rock too. But if as an adult you sincerely believe the US has actually been a "melting pot" at any point in history, you are deeply misinformed. What about Native American genocide, slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, redlining, or mass incarceration sounds like a "melting pot" to you?