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America Is Not A Melting Pot Summary

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The Melted Melting Pot
An assumption about America was that it is a melting pot (Kohn 1961). The ethnic church was seen as a place solely for immigrants, with the presupposition that the SSG would eventually melt into mainstream society. However, for decades now, studies have shown that America is not a melting pot. One’s ethnicity has profound implications on their identity. . In an article for Asian American Society, Phi Hong Su wrote, “Three basic assumptions of classical assimilation include: the superiority of white Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs), the inferiority of immigrant cultures, and the unidimensionality of ethnic change. These three assumptions signal the expectation that immigrants will come to share the culture of the dominant …show more content…

In 1999, Elijah Anderson wrote, “Rather than giving it up, racial and ethnic groups appear to embrace their particularism. In public and to an extent in private life, there is more mixing of people of various groups than there was a generation ago, but at the same time people tend to retain more of their ethnic particularity within these interactions.” He goes on to write, “the wake of the civil rights movement encouraged racial pride among African Americans. This in turn prompted other groups to do the same. At the same time, the U.S. experienced an influx of immigration, especially people of color, who have likewise retained their particularity.” By the early 2000s, sociologists and political scientists started to emphasize the significance of ethnic identity and the pluralism of society (Barry, 2001; Favell, 1998; Verkuyten, …show more content…

Segmented assimilation theory assumes that immigrants will assimilate into different categories, or segments, and that there are many different paths to get there (Gans, 1992; Portes & Zhou, 1993). Segmented assimilation theory is widely held by many sociologists (Boyd, 2002; Berry, 2006; Warner, 2007; Piedra & Engstrom, 2009; Haller, Portes & Lynch, 2011) and does well in accounting for America’s multicultural landscape.
A criticism of segmented assimilation is that it has difficulty accounting for intergenerational paths of assimilation (Faulkner, 2011). Important factors about individuals such as gender, and socio-economic status are not considered. And group factors such as how long the immigrant/migrant community has been established, and what was going on in the greater sociopolitical arenas during the time of immigration are not considered. It is hard to apply the same immigration theories to different individuals or

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