Refining The American Dream
The American ideal is the vast melting pot.
The American myth is the vast melting pot.
They are not one and the same thing.
The ideal is what we are supposed to strive for, but the myth is the not-so-polite fiction white culture uses to justify itself.
What happens in a melting pot?
Well, when you combine tin and copper, you get bronze -- an alloy stronger and superior to the two pure ores.
When you combine iron and carbon, you get steel -- another alloy stronger and superior to the two pure sources.
But white culture in America does not want a melting pot.
Not really.
What they want is homeopathy; i.e., to dilute the non-white elements down to the point of non-existence, then falsely claim the purported new synthesis is stronger and better than the original.
Bull.
White culture in America has always defined itself by what it excludes. Historically the infamous "one drop" laws rendered otherwise "white" persons as "black" even if only one great-great-ancestor was African.
Never the other way around.
Never, “Hey, your great-grandfather was Anglo, so that makes you one of us!”
No. Always “Get out, [ethnic slur of choice]” no matter how “white” one looked / felt / acted.
And for a long time, “whiteness” applied only to the proverbial WASPs: White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
That is, until demographics began eating away at them.
First the Protestantism went so German Catholics could be included.
Then Irish and Italian descendants; so long Anglo-Saxon purity.
Now the definition of “whiteness” includes Slavs and Eastern Europeans and Mormons and Jewish people (but only the ones who don’t make a big deal about their Jewishness; see homeopathy above).
As biology eats away at their numbers, far too many whites live in existential dread of losing the only real possession they have: A sense of identity that tells them they are inherently superior to non-whites.
They're not all hate mongering bigots; a lot of white supremacists are on a personal level kind and compassionate people who treat others fairly.
But they can't abide the thought of living in a world where they are not on top, but instead simply one of many.
Rather than become durable, flexible, superior steel they choose to remain brittle iron, preferring to rust away rather than bond with carbon.
That idea -- the idea that historically white culture is the only culture that matters -- that idea has to die if America is to live and thrive and grow.
Some try to champion alternate ideas to the melting pot: The salad bowl or the stew pot.
A culture made up of many distinct sub-cultures, each working with the others in its own unique fashion; or a culture made up of many sub-cultures, each blending together with others, but maintaining identifiable characteristics.
Are salads and stews as good as the new superior alloy produced in the melting pot?
No.
But they are infinitely better than the lethal quackery of homeopathy.
© Buzz Dixon
