Last of three parts
The previous part is at thevoice.us/introspection-for-national-metaphor-new-definition
The melting pot is an outdated image of the United States. We need a new metaphor to define the Nation.
Cecilia González-Andrieu writes the following article for the American Magazine.
“As self-interested individualism cleaved from communal concerns is set up at the center of early Americanism, a second identity marker develops during the wave of European migration that opens the 20th Century: The melting pot. Although it seems to promote the opposite of individualism and was thus envisioned by its author, it was swiftly detached from its original meaning and put at the service of ‘Americanism’ narrowly defined. To answer the question of who we are requires a deeper interrogation of the idea of the melting pot.
“The Melting Pot
“In the middle of the pandemic, I convened an online conversation about the idea of the melting pot. The thoughtful responses disclosed understandings forged in diverse contexts. Older folks thought it an outdated idea that had lost its usefulness, yet I was surprised that young people revealed its centrality in their elementary school classrooms. One millennial political scientist, Alejandra Alarcón, recounted that even though it was a relic by her elementary school days, a segment on the melting pot recipe in the “Schoolhouse Rock” television series was formative for her generation. Although some who grew into adulthood abroad understood the melting pot positively as merging, not losing, those from communities of color in the United States reacted with an opposite view.
“Using images of assimilation, erasure, disappearance and lie, they related painful memories pointing to how the melting pot was weaponized as a way to destroy particularity at the service of a homogenized national identity. What the conversation revealed is that a construction of Americanism defined as a melting pot became synonymous with the Euro-American, prosperous, whiteness, defined earlier by J Hector St. John Crèvecoeur (a Frenchman in the 18th Century who married an American and was a popular writer). The requirement of blending in and disappearing into an undifferentiated mass resulted in the loss of languages, customs and religions, and became an aspirational goal.
“As the theologian Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J., pointed out in his lecture “Toward a New Narrative for the Latino Presence in U.S. Society and the Church” in 2012, Catholic thinkers in the United States embraced the Americanist principle and supported the concept of Americanization which they identified with modernity as something positive that would allow the Catholic immigrants to be accepted by and eventually exercise influence over the dominant WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture of the United States. What assimilation based on whiteness makes impossible is any inclusion of people of color. It strips human dignity away from anyone refusing to submit.
“What assimilation based on whiteness makes impossible is any inclusion of people of color. It strips human dignity away from anyone refusing to submit.
“The Crucible
“In 1908, the play The Melting Pot opened in New York City and premiered the metaphor that eventually became synonymous with assimilation. Yet, this was far from the intention of the play’s author, the acclaimed Jewish writer, Israel Zangwill.
“The drama presents a cast of immigrants asking the question ‘Who shall we be?’ as life explodes around them through the aspirations of the young and the suffering of their elders. David, the young Jewish protagonist and sole survivor of a pogrom in Russia on Easter, takes refuge with relatives in the teeming tenements of New York City. He wrestles with ways to make sense of his faith, his language, and his ancestors, conscious of the extraordinary suffering of the new immigrants arriving every day. Zangwill uses the phrase ‘melting-pot’ only once in the play: A more prominent metaphor is ‘God’s Crucible,’ a key religious term whose meaning has been subsequently lost.
“The ‘Crucible of God’ refers to the ways David makes sense of the searing experience of desolation and poverty, the self-destruction caused by despair, and the hope of forging bonds in shared vulnerability that will melt away ‘the feuds and vendettas’ of old lives. Exploring bitterly the anti-Semitism that cost him his family, David imagines a new human family, where Christians recognize ‘that this Christ, whom holy chants proclaimed re-risen, was born in the form of a brother Jew.’
“The heartbreaking retelling of the murder of his family as they celebrate Passover and his father clasps to his breast the Holy Scroll had a particularly powerful purpose. President Theodore Roosevelt was in the opening night audience, and through the play Zangwill pleads the case for 10,000 Jews fleeing Europe to be allowed into the United States. As David exclaims for the president’s ears, I am ‘holding out my hands with prayer and music toward the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God! The Past I cannot mend—its evil outlines are stamped in immortal rigidity, take away the hope that I can mend the Future, and you make me mad.’
“By 1914, the play’s meaning had been so distorted that Zangwill penned a response. ‘The process of American amalgamation is not assimilation,’ he wrote, ‘or simple surrender to the dominant type…but an all-round-give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched.’ He points out that his characters learn not to erase, but embrace uniqueness and value each other. The anti-Semitic Irish maid learns some Yiddish, and the observant Jewish grandmother accepts that her grandson must play the violin on the Sabbath to feed his family.
“Who Are We?
“We are called anew to this question of who we are. Individualism will be our end, and the melting pot betrayed us. We need our metaphors for who we are to be both global and intimate. Perhaps the Holy Spirit breathed some of it into being in Pope Francis’ ‘Urbi et Orbi’ meditation on the Gospel of Mark. ‘We have realized,’ the pope tells us, ‘that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat…are all of us…we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.’
“It is time for a new human to emerge, ready to row for the sake of all. We are sharing the boat full of faith in each other, surprised by the gift and vulnerability of our fellow rowers, and as we row forward together, we face down the storm in kinship. Future reader, I hope we found dry land and built something new. Only you will know,” Cecilia González-Andrieu wrote.