31 / 12 / 2008
The immigration debate has created a very strange dichotomy in American society, one that’s been seen around the world, but not on this scale. Since the Revolutionary War, the face of America has changed regularly.
A cultural identity is a sort of myth by definition. There are very few “pure” cultures left, but they’re routinely upheld [...]
American identity crisis? What american?
The immigration debate has created a very strange dichotomy in American society, one that’s been seen around the world, but not on this scale. Since the Revolutionary War, the face of America has changed regularly.
A cultural identity is a sort of myth by definition. There are very few “pure” cultures left, but they’re routinely upheld by advocates of the social equivalent of monocultures. America, since the Melting Pot days, has been lugging around the Anglo American image like a security blanket.
Not unusual. In the New World Anglo cultures, cultural acknowledgment, let alone shifts, have been slow, often cosmetic, and sometimes quite hypocritical. In the New World Hispanic nations, the “Spanish” look belies a lot of cultural mixes. Russia is a hybrid nation of various ethnicities, with the actual Russians just one of the group.
The UK, France, Belgium, Germany and Italy, have complex cultural identities, including lots of different groups. Not a monoculture among them, but you’d swear the “typical” social ID for each country was an image of a single cultural identity. In Europe, that hasn’t really been the case since the pre Roman times.
Then there’s the assimilation idea, ably explained by Barbara Sowell in her DJ piece yesterday. This has been a major issue, and communal whining point, for a while now, as well as an ideological punching bag.
So why is America, arguably the greatest representative of cultural diversity on Earth, looking for a single American identity? Why does it think that it’s going to find a single image? For that matter, where does it think it can find a single image?
If you tried to market America as a product, and used a single image to do it, you’d probably get sued for misrepresentation, if not actually institutionalized for your mental health.
Those are real questions, not rhetorical. Part of the problem is that the old images of America were so limited, and conceptually limiting. Multiculturalism was a term designed to cover co extant cultures in a society. The term “multi cultural society” implies a composite entity, but also implies a functional society where the various cultures coexist.
The US has basically created a problem for itself with the insistence on a single image. The Anglo image may look “normal”, but let’s face it, it’s pretty damn dishonest. The sheer number of non Anglo contributors to American history would fill whole states quite easily.
Assimilation, as a word, has a few unfortunate echoes of the old days in which native populations were to be “assimilated” in terms of erasing their cultures. It didn’t work, anywhere on Earth, and was, understandably, hated by those who were supposed to be “assimilated” whether they liked it or not.
The pity in terms of the concept as it is meant is that things like speaking English are good social defences for people from non Anglo cultures. Some are horribly disadvantaged, and exploited, because they don’t know their rights.
Social orientation, as a matter of fact, isn’t “assimilation”, it really is orientation, and very useful in terms of just knowing how to live in a society.
Source: American identity crisis? What american?
HellenesOnline | 31 / 12 / 2008 | MULTICULTURALISM | Tags: AFRICA, MULTICULTURALISM, THE AMERICAS |
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