Chapter 11

The Architecture of Inequality: Race and Ethnicity

Assimilation versus Multiculturalism

Soon the presumption that the "typical" American is someone who can trace her or his ancestors to Europe will be a thing of the past. The United States is in a period of unprecedented ethnic diversification:

• Over the past decade the number of U.S. residents for whom English is a foreign language have increased by 38%.¹
  
  
• Nationwide, of the 43.6 million children attending public school, 2.6 million (or 5%) don't speak English as their first language—an increase of 76% in the past decade.²
  
  
• In states such as New York and New Mexico, as many as 25% of students in the schools don't speak English.³
  
  
• In one elementary school in Brooklyn, 40% of the children are immigrants whose families speak any one of 26 languages.⁴
  
  
• Schools in Arlington, Virginia, now need to offer bilingual education or other language support for children in as many as 100 different languages. What effect will these changes in racial and ethnic configuration have on our personal lives, our culture, and our social institutions?

One of the bedrock goals of the American value system has always been the ultimate assimilation of racial and ethnic groups into mainstream society; in the process, members of minority groups change their ways to conform to those of the dominant culture. In the 19th century, the United States was described as the great "melting pot," a place where immigrants of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds willingly and happily blended to create a brand-new national identity. Most people believed that opportunities for inclusion into the larger society, as well as high-paying, stable jobs, could come about only if people from different cultures gradually lost their differences and adopted the lifestyle of the majority.

Assimilation sounded good to many Americans well into the 20th century, particularly when spiced with stories of their own grandparents arriving in this country as penniless immigrants but working hard and eventually "becoming" proud Americans.

However, the inherent trap of assimilation is that although it may signal an ethnic or racial group's inclusion in mainstream society, it also requires the group to transcend its status as a disliked minority by conforming to the dominant—in our society, European-American—way of life.

Assimilation has sometimes been systematically forced on groups whose beliefs conflict with those of the dominant white culture. Native Americans, for instance, were forced to abandon a lifestyle that was built on values unacceptable to whites. When blacks were brought to America as slaves, they were forced to take new names, families were split apart, and they were forbidden to practice any of the traditions of their native cultures. For them, and for other minority groups, assimilation is sometimes an undesirable goal.

In contrast to the melting pot model, many people today feel that a pluralistic or multicultural society—in which groups maintain not only their ethnic identity but also their own language, art, music, food, literature, and religion—enriches American civilization. With the massive influx of foreign-born, non-English-speaking people into this country, it has become especially difficult to think of America as one culture and Americans as one people.

Many of our social institutions are struggling with the question of how to represent the different histories and cultures of all these diverse groups. In the educational system, the traditional emphasis on the history and culture of white European civilization is now considered racist and incomplete. Over the past 25 years, most universities have created what are known as ethnic studies programs: African-American Studies, Latino/Latina or Chicano Studies, Asian Studies, Native-American Studies.

Multiculturalism has also become an issue in the workplace. Employers are finding that immigrants and members of minority groups are holding an ever-more-significant proportion of the jobs.⁵

Only a few years ago the idea of adjusting to ethnic and racial diversity in the workplace was dismissed by employers as irrelevant to production and profit and as threatening to the white male workforce. Today, however, most employers view diversity as good business. Companies that set aside time and money to cultivate diversity hope to prevent costly lawsuits over unfair treatment and to provide a more tolerant and innovative work environment.

Today, many employers have learned how to accommodate cultural differences. For instance, a manager may be encouraged to realize that an Asian employee's reluctance to give an oral presentation at a staff meeting is motivated by that individual's adherence to cultural norms of modesty and not by professional inadequacy.⁶

Ironically, at a time when ethnic diversity and tolerance for that diversity is at an all-time high, the inaccurate "melting pot" metaphor may be closer than ever to reality. Mass forms of communication and transportation are powerful forces breaking down the unique aspects of cultures and promoting only slight ethnic variations. The same basic billboard that pictures white people and is written in English in Iowa is slightly altered to feature blacks in Detroit and to express its message in Spanish in Miami.⁷

Moreover, as the population becomes more ethnically varied, especially in major cities, cultures begin to fuse in curious combinations:

Just as the Irish, Poles, Jews and Italians, who had rubbed shoulders and more in the wake of the European immigration of 1900, had, by the 1950s and '60s, begun to intermarry en masse, so the process is beginning to take place among recent arrivals in L.A. One can find every sort of nonwhite combination in the city now: Hmong and Salvadoran, Ethiopian and Taiwanese, Mexican and Filipino.⁸

Beyond the complexities of societal trends, the debate over assimilation versus multiculturalism is far from settled. For instance, the movement to make English the official language of the United States is a backlash against multiculturalism. Nevertheless, many people who identify themselves as members of racial and ethnic groupsóas well as many Americans who identify with the mainstream cultureócelebrate the rich diversity of cultures in our society.

¹Barringer, F. 1993. "Immigration in the '80's made English a foreign language for millions." New York Times, April 28.

²Hornblower, M. 1995. "Putting tongues in check." Time, October 9.

³Leslie, C. 1991. "Classrooms of Babel." Newsweek, February 11.

⁴Leslie, C. 1991. "Classrooms of Babel." Newsweek, February 11.

⁵Williams, L. 1992. "Scrambling to manage a diverse workforce." New York Times, December 12.

⁶Williams, L. 1992. "Scrambling to manage a diverse workforce." New York Times, December 12.

⁷Marger, M. N. 1994. Race and ethnic relations: American and global perspectives. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

⁸Rieff, D. 1991. "The new face of L.A." Los Angeles Times Magazine, September 15. p. 20.