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Having had a nice nappy and feeling somewhat less cranky, let me put it this way:
In the US, multiculturalism is a portmanteau word which can be invested with pretty much whatever meaning the user chooses. That permits it to be identified as the cure for all our ills and the very thing that is causing the illness. Without knowing exactly what a person means by "multiculturalism," it's impossible to engage in any dialogue on the topic, IMHO.
Hence, my immediate reaction to a declaration that multiculturalism is an abject failure is to assume the worst. My bad.
Nonetheless, I find the declaration to be at best premature, and at worst a cover for reinstitutionalization of racism. (Not accusing you of the latter--I just see it a lot over here.)
I cannot even remotely speak to the experience of Norway, or of any of those other distant countries which are not the USofA. I am, for all my vaunted open-mindedness, still an American, and still lazy on a great number of issues. I am handicapped by living in an insular country. I visited the UK last year, and was fascinated (and a little horrified) that the Beeb was as likely to lead its news (a stultifying full hour, minimum, of an evening--never sell in America) with a US story as a Brit one. I suspect that there are many Europeans who know more about the US than many Americans do. Thus, I am at this moment equipped only to address the American experience.
As a first matter, I think there is a great myth about the American melting pot. As it has passed into the realm of received knowledge, the great melting pot is imagined to have been a country which actually followed the dictates of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty. America was the place which welcomed with open arms the world's tired, poor masses who were yearning to breathe free.
But I'm not sure when it ever was so. The experience of the Irish is a good case in point. Even though they had no severe language barrier--they spoke something like English, albeit with an immediately identifiable accent--it took forty or fifty years for them to establish general acceptance amongst "real" Americans. A part of that struggle for acceptance was, as a matter of fact, remaining insular. The real breakthrough was when the Boston and New York Irish communities attained sufficient numbers to act as a voting bloc and begin to establish political power. They did not do that as fully assimilated Americans; they did it as a community of shunned outsiders, who retained their native identity enough to act together.
You can trace the same path for Jewish and Italian immigrants. In fact, the throwaway jab about Scandinavians has more than a slight grain of truth. Even the whitest immigrants tended to start out banding together and working their way into the mainstream rather slowly. I spent my young years in the godforsaken state of Nebraska. Up in the desolate sandhills, there's a town called Dannebrog. Guess who settled that town? And they still celebrate their Danish heritage. There's a little town called Ord which is an outpost of Catholicism in a great wilderness of protestants; it was settled by Poles. The city of Seattle has a neighborhood called Ballard which holds an annual parade where people walk through the streets chanting "Lutefisk, lutefisk, lefsa, lefsa. We're from Ballard, ya sure you betcha!" There's a town on the Kitsap Peninsula (State of Washington again) that greets visitors with a big sign reading "Willkommen til Poulsbo." (I suspect I spelled that first word wrong; again, I'm an American so I speak but one language, instead of the 15 or 16 standard in the rest of the world.)
The short of it is: back in the day, assimilation was not some magic thing that happened the instant someone got their new name and stepped off Ellis Island. Sure, there were families where the kids instantly went to school and learned English as fast as they could. But I'd wager that there were a great many of the original immigrants who never learned English at all, or no more than enough to ask for groceries at the local market. (To engage in the American sport of citing anecdotal evidence as if it means something, I know a young woman who came from Korea when she was three. She started kindergarten knowing hardly a word of English. She learned the language on her own, and taught it to her two younger siblings. All three of them have college degrees. Her parents started a dry cleaning business, and are comfortable members of the American middle class. They speak exactly enough English to operate their business; at home they speak Korean, and that is the language they speak with their children. So good old-fashioned rapid assimilation is still present, but note that it is the younger generation which assimilates. Of course, they're all still Korean; my friend seeks out other Koreans--not that easy a task in Seattle--because she longs to speak the language and to maintain the cultural ties. To me, that's assimilation and multiculturalism.)
But it was true then, and it is true now, that some accents were more acceptable than others, and blonde white types could get cut more slack than swarthy Mediterranean sorts. Even at that, there was a certain acceptance that people with a common linguistic/national/ethnic background were going to go live in Irishtown, Germantown, or whatever part of the city those folks gathered in.
Now, in this day of instant communications and instant results, there seems to be no patience for that process: "You people have been here en masse for 10 years and you still can't speak decent English, and you still practice your foreign rituals. Why don't you do like the real immigrants did, and blend in forthwith." This attitude is fostered by the huge media platform afforded the jingos and closet segregationists, whose real problem is the existence of dusky others, and who are really quite happy that they don't fit in right away. What better reason to send 'em back where they came from?
I would argue that America has always been multicultural, in the sense that new arrivals tended to segregate, partly from necessity, and partly for comfort. There has always been, and remains, an identification with the traditions of the country of origin. The assimilation process has always been slow, but the realization of that fact has passed from the accepted mythology. The acceptance or rejection of the survival of tradition does seem to be related to how "foreign" those traditions are (e.g., while Catholics have long been disfavored--look no further than the 1960 question of JFK's electability--they at least identified as Christian, albeit of a rather misguided sort; the same cannot be said of Muslims).
The odd part of it is this: In America, there's a great myth that the whole world wants to come here so they can live the American dream, currently held to be the right to get richer than hell. A lot of these non-white immigrants who are impatiently told to get with the program do exactly what the American dream calls for: they start small businesses and start accumulating wealth. What's the result? You can drive through towns in the heartland of America and see signs on motels reading "American owned." People feel free to joke that all the convenience stores are owned by those dadgum immigrants.
So we fall back on cultural differences: sure, they're living the American dream, but they don't talk right, they aren't becoming good Protestants, and they don't look like us.
When I react negatively to proclamations that assimilation is a great failure, that's what I'm talking about.
Now. What do you mean?
And I really don't intend to try to ban you from DU, or even suggest that you shouldn't be here. I would say that you've hit on a couple of rather hot-button issues, so you shouldn't be too surprised if you get more than a little vociferous (and, in my case, rather vicious) reaction. My snarky ranting aside, I'm really quite enjoying these exchanges. I freely admit that you have a much better viewpoint on the world than do I, so I really shouldn't be quite so quick to mount my tall steed.
On your Iraq war thread, I will say this: I suspect that there were some others who, like me, were a bit startled to discover that Norway is a member of the great Coalition of the Ummmmm, Ummmmm, Whatever. Please understand that while our Fierce Warrior Chieftain has touted his coalition far and wide, he's been rather closed-mouthed about who's in the club. Granting that, while I pay more attention than the average American, I still don't pay as much as I could, I was really rather surprised to learn that there are Norwegian soldiers in Iraq. To me, that goes a long way toward explaining your devotion to making that invasion a good thing. If I had my druthers, I'd like to believe that my countrymen are not participating in a gigantic, tragic scam. But on that one, I may actually be better in touch with the propaganda and lies than your are: I have to swim in it every day.
Best to you. And what in the world are you doing going to sleep? You posted at 1:22 in the afternoon. (Isn't everybody on American time?)
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