Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

GREAT BIG MELTING POT

 

I recently read and reviewed on this blog Gregory O’Brien’s enjoyable Always Song in the Water, a reflection on New Zealand’s status as an oceanic continent. Of no major significance in the book, and certainly not reflecting O’Brien’s humane views, I found in the text a phrase that is rarely used nowadays. In passing, O’Brien mentions “the cultural melting pot of Aotearoa New Zealand over the past few decades”(p.173).

“Melting pot”. Now there’s a phrase you hardly hear anymore – and when it is used, it is heavily criticised for committing the sin of “assimilationism”. Current wisdom says that if you speak of diverse ethnicities in a particular country blending together in a “melting pot”, then you are denying each ethnicity its own uniqueness and culture. You are assuming that they will all abandon their inherited customs and be absorbed into one homogenous cultural norm. And usually, goes this argument, the norm will be a white European norm. Ergo assimilation is racist and the more acceptable buzz-word now is “diversity”.

I can see some merit in this argument, although I can also see ways in which it is blind to reality.

A little research (thank you, Wikipedia) tells me that the phrase “melting pot”, as related to culture and ethnicity, was first used by “nativists” in mid-19^th century America. They were those English-speaking Americans who resented the influx of Irish, Italian, Jewish and other non-English-speaking immigrants. They claimed that everybody should be just “American” rather than “Irish-American”, “Italian-American” etc. But clearly by “American”, the “nativists” meant WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) like the Founding Fathers. The message was clear. To be a true Amertican, you should conform culturally to US and abandon YOUR inherited ways. (In the original argument African-Americans were not considered because at the time they were not regarded as full citizens.)

Sometimes this argument could be made with benign intent by immigrants themselves. I was already aware that the phrase “melting pot” really took off in 1908 when the Russian-Jewish American Israel Zangwill wrote his successful play The Melting Pot. It argued that America was a tolerant and open society accepting all cultures and religions, quite unlike the old Imperial Russia which Zangwill’s family had escaped, where pogroms were still common. Zangwill’s conception of the “melting pot”  was a society of mutual acceptance in which the best elements of  different cultures would ultimately blend together on equal terms. But more often, the “melting pot” meant conformity to Anglo-American norms. Notoriously, Henry Ford (a rabid anti-Semite among other things) made all new immigrant employees at his main plants go through a ceremony in which they pledged allegiance to the flag and announced that they were no longer Italian, Greek etc. but just “American”. He even employed “social workers” to examine the families of his immigrant employees and ensure that they were not lapsing back into their traditional ethnic ways.

The “melting pot” concept was very durable. From when I was a teenager, I remember a nauseating song that was often heard on the radio. Even at the time I found it rather smug, although I would not have been able to articulate why. It was called “Melting Pot” and not only did it mention “yellow Chinkees”, but its main verse went:

“What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough to take the world and all its got

And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee-coloured people by the score.”

I think it was that “coffee-coloured people” bit that really turned me off, with its implication that people should not be happy to be black, white, yellow or any other skin tone. It was a call to conformity. I had assumed that the song was American, because it sounded like the equally bland Disney “It’s a small world after all” song. Coming out in 1969, it was in fact the work of an English pop group “Blue Mink”, written by two of its members Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway. It probably had the good intention of opposing racism, but its cure for racism was to pretend that various and separate cultures couldn’t and shouldn’t endure. Its “melting pot” meant we would all be the same.

But now, as I have to, I come to the other side of the argument. Isn’t the current catch-cry of “diversity” also an illusion? To limit my reflection to New Zealand, we no longer have simply Maori and Pakeha, but we now have many thousands of New Zealanders who are Samoan, Tongan, Chinese, Indian, Korean, African and other ethnicities. Yet all these peoples now live under one law, make use of the same technologies, deal with the same institutions and [in the main] go through the same education system. I would also point out that, though there are now available in New Zealand broadcasts, pod-casts and tele-casts in other languages, the overwhleming language of popular culture is English. And, while there are efforts to build up the number of speakers of Maori, English remains the country’s only universally-understood language.

Recognising these facts is not to accept a “melting pot” mentality. It is simply to point out that even as diverse ethnicities are accepted, even as there are an increasing number of public celebrations of different cultures (the indian Diwali; the Chinese lantern festival and New Year etc.), there are also strong forces that hold us together. In other words, a certain degree of assimilation is inevitable. It is not enough to say that this is “common humanity” or “decency”. It is the fact that a society has to live by some accepted norms, or it will rapdly fall apart, and then we head into the fractious politics of sectionalism, where all things are referred to in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc. instead of in terms of our shared citizenship.

You might have noticed that nowhere in this argument have I used the term “multiculturalism”. There is a reason for this (and it is NOT the argument given by some Maori polemicists that multiculturalism is merely a Pakeha trick to blot out what they think should be New Zealand’s bi-culturalism). “Mutlculturalism” assumes that separate cultures will endure complete and unaffected by other cultures – a kind of eternal patchwork of identities. But it never works that way. When different ethnic cultures exist side-by-side, they gradually modify one another. This is not a restatement of the “melting pot” idea. It is a recognition of change – and one in which each group retains a distinct identity, but also has much in common with other groups and accepts those distinctions.