Bill Quigley

19 Sep 2007

The Dual Melting Pot

by Stephen Steinberg

"America's melting pot has been inclusive of
everybody but blacks."

This
article is excerpted from Dr. Steinberg's book, Race Relations: A
Critique, published in September by Stanford University Press. The text
preceding the excerpt criticizes sociologists for advancing "an epistemology of
wishful thinking" that denies the reality of the melting pot.

"....Like it
or not - and the dissent of the multiculturalists is clear - assimilation is
the wave of the future, the inexorable byproduct of forces put into motion by
the act of immigration itself." MeltingPot.cartoonjpg

Admittedly,
this is a sweeping conclusion. While I believe that it captures the main thrust
of American ethnic history, it does not tell the whole story. In particular, it
does not account for the African American exception. Here we speak of a group
that came to America in slave galleys, not immigrant vessels. While successive
waves of immigrants flowed into the country, first to settle the land mass and
later to provide labor for burgeoning industries, blacks were trapped in the
South in a system of feudal agriculture. Even in the North, a rigid color line
excluded them from the manufacturing sector, except for a few dirty,
backbreaking, and dangerous jobs that whites spurned. In effect, the industrial
revolution was "for whites only," depriving blacks of the jobs and
opportunities that delivered Europe's huddled masses from poverty.

"Even in the North, a rigid color line excluded
blacks from the manufacturing sector, except for a few dirty, backbreaking, and
dangerous jobs that whites spurned."

This was the historic wrong that was supposed to be
remedied by landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. However, by the
time large numbers of blacks arrived in northern cities, the manufacturing
sector was undergoing a long-term decline, reflecting the impact of laborsaving
technology and the export of jobs to low-wage countries. Not only did blacks
encounter a far less favorable structure of opportunity than did immigrants,
not only did they suffer from the economic consequences of past discrimination,
not only did they continue to encounter pervasive racism in the world of work,
but they also encountered intense labor competition from yet another huge wave
of immigrants. Ironically, most of these immigrants would not be here but for
the civil rights movement that led to the overhaul of immigration policy in
1965.

The
standard cant is that immigrants take jobs that blacks don't want, but this is
a partial truth at best. Immigrants have made inroads into every segment of the
workforce, including coveted jobs in the health care industries, construction,
building maintenance, light manufacturing, and even government service, which
has long been the staple of the black middle class. Nor are immigrants any
longer restricted to a few gateway cities. Increasingly, they are penetrating
all regions of the nation and all segments of the American economy, as is their
aspiration and their right. Without doubt the continuing flow of immigrants has
been a boon to the national economy, but it has also dealt a blow to African
Americans who were poised for progress in the wake of the Civil Rights
Revolution.

Notwithstanding
their "racial" differences and the many impediments that they confront, the new
immigrants have been able to bypass blacks on the proverbial road to success.
As I argued above, this is also a road that ultimately leads into the melting
pot. It is a mark of the melting pot's failure that African Americans, whose
roots on American soil go back to the founding of the nation, are today more
segregated than recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America. According to
Douglas S. Massey, "no other ethnic or racial group in the United states has
ever, even briefly, experienced such high levels of residential segregation."What clearer manifestation of
African American exceptionalism could there be?

"The new immigrants have been able to bypass blacks
on the proverbial road to success."

All the
while that Zangwill's
melting pot was "roaring and bubbling," and Europe's "races" were
amalgamating into whites, thirty states had antimiscegenation laws proscribing
marriages between blacks and whites. Sixteen of these states still had these
laws on the books when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in
1967. Even today, at a time when marriage across racial lines has been soaring
for Asians and Latinos, it has inched up only slightly for blacks (to 6 percent
for males and 2 percent for females).

Not only do
blacks bear the brunt of exclusion, but there is also evidence that many blacks
actively reject the melting pot. At least this can be inferred from baby naming
practices. In A Matter of Taste, Stanley Lieberson found that black and
white naming conventions were similar early in the century, but diverged
sharply after the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1960s.

Blacks
developed a custom of finding unique names, often derived from African
languages, or coining entirely new names. A recent study based on California's
birth data found that "more than 40 percent of black girls were given names
that were not given to even one of the more than 100,000 white girls born in
the state the same year."In
New York City, the five most popular names for black girls in 2005 were Kayla,
Jada, Madison, Destiny, and Brianna. For boys they are Joshua, Elijah, Justin,
Jayden, and Isaiah.With
the exception of Justin, which is popular among Asians and Latinos, these names
have little currency among other groups.If it is true,
as I contended earlier, that the naming practices among Asians and
Latinos indicate that these groups are on a path into the melting pot, then the
naming practices among blacks suggest the opposite: that blacks are defiantly
running away from the melting pot. Not without penalty, however. Recent studies
report that employers often discriminate against applicants who have
conspicuously "black" names.

"The naming practices among blacks suggest that
blacks are defiantly running away from the melting pot."

There are
other ways in which it can be said that blacks are "running away from the
melting pot." At the same time that immigrants were losing their ancestral
languages, blacks were forging an African American dialect, one that, according
to sociolinguists, has all of the defining attributes of a legitimate language.Another example is the emergence of
Kwanzaa as an African American variant of Christmas. As Elizabeth Pleck has
shown, this was the invention of black nationalists in the 1970s, but over time
has evolved into a celebration of family and blackness.By themselves, these developments
may not be all that important, but they are important insofar as they reflect
deeper trends of identity, culture, and community.

Here we
confront the major point of difference between African Americans and immigrants
so far as the issue of culture is concerned. For immigrants, the ethnic
community was a transitional phenomenon that facilitated their movement,
geographically and socially, into the mainstream of society. To be sure,
economically mobile immigrants exhibited a pattern of resegregation, as Louis
Wirth observed, as they attempted to rebuild churches and other institutions
that were essential to their collective survival.They did not simply flop into the melting pot and melt
into oblivion. However, we now have the verdict of history, though some will
still deny it: these ethnic communities were destined to a gradual and
inexorable decline across generations.

For African
Americans it was another matter altogether: the ghetto was a permanent fact of
life. And here we confront a great historical paradox - for these ghettos, the
enforced home of the nation's racial pariahs, also spawned and nourished a
vibrant African American subculture. Again, the contrast with immigrants is
striking, as Bob Blauner argued in Racial Oppression in America.

Whereas the
immigrant ghettos allowed ethnic cultures to flower for a period, in the long
term they functioned as way stations on the road to acculturation and
assimilation. But the black ghetto has served as a central fixture of American
racism's strong resistance to the assimilation of black people. Thus the
ghetto's permanence has made it a continuing crucible for ethnic development
and culture building.

"The black ghetto has served as a central fixture of
American racism's strong resistance to the assimilation of black people."

Thus, the supreme paradox: precisely because of its
permanence, the ghetto functions as "a continuing crucible for ethnic
development and culture building." It is precisely because no other ethnic or
racial group in the United States has ever experienced such prolonged levels of
residential segregation that the ecological and social prerequisites did not
exist for ethnic persistence and renewal.

Other
differences ensue from the simple fact that blacks were not immigrants. Unlike
immigrants, who clung to vestiges of cultures ripped from their moorings in
distant places, black culture evolved out of the lived experience of black
people on American soil. Instead of isolated fragments selected precisely
because they did not interfere with mainstream American culture, black culture
is an integral part of the everyday lives of black people. In short, it is a living
culture, one that displays a vitality and dynamism that is generally
lacking among the atrophying cultures of the nation's immigrant groups.

Ironically,
generations of sociologists have taken the opposite position, on the one hand
valorizing the rich cultures of the nation's immigrants, and on the other,
holding that blacks were "only white men with black skin, nothing more, nothing
less," as Kenneth Stampp wrote in the preface to The Peculiar Institution.The further irony is that this
position had liberal intentions. It was the way that white liberals avowed that
blacks are "just like us" but for the happenstance of skin color. It was meant
as a compliment, however much it was predicated on myopia and condescension.

This is how
Nathan Glazer came to commit a major gaffe. In Beyond the Melting Pot,
in which he and Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared that ethnic groups survived
the melting pot, Glazer wrote: "it is not possible for Negroes to view
themselves as other ethnic groups viewed themselves because - and this is the
key to much in the Negro world - the Negro is an American and nothing else. He
has no values and culture to guard and protect."This was 1963, before the upsurge of black militancy and
the eruption of the "soul movement" that celebrated and rejuvenated black
culture. By 1970 Glazer came under fierce attack, and in the second edition, he
confessed, albeit in fine print, that his statement had given him "considerable
pain." All that he meant, he now explained, was that blacks have no foreign
culture to guard and protect. However, this only compounds the error! These
foreign cultures - precisely because they were foreign - were destined to a
gradual but inexorable decline. In contrast, black culture is a bona fide
example of ethnogenesis - literally, the genesis of new cultural forms that
evolved through interaction with American culture, a far cry from the fraught
attempts of immigrants to cling to shards of the past. Moreover, as an
indigenous product of the American experience, black culture continues not only
to thrive in segregated black communities but also to exert a powerful
influence on mainstream American culture.

"Black culture is a bona fide example of
ethnogenesis - literally, the genesis of new cultural forms."

In an
edited collection, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', and Slam Dunking, Gena
Dagel Caponi and her collaborators make a powerful case that there is - always
has been - a distinctive African American aesthetic that runs through music,
dance, sport (hence the inclusion of slam dunking), and oral expression.The vitality and dynamism of this
aesthetic derives, not from tutelage, but from the lived experience of ordinary
people. This is captured in an evocative passage from an autobiographical book
by Johnny Otis, a white rhythm and blues artist who grew up in a black
neighborhood in Berkeley, California:

"I never
had to instruct my horn players how to phrase a passage.... The music grew out
of the African American way of life. The way mama cooked, the Black English
grandmother and grandfather spoke, the way daddy disciplined the kids - the
emphasis on spiritual values, the way Reverend Jones preached, the way Sister
Williams sang in the choir, the way the old brother down the street played the
slide guitar and crooned the blues, the very special way the people danced,
walked, laughed, cried, joked, got happy, shouted in church. In the final
analysis, what forms the texture and adds character to the music is the African
American experience."

Clearly,
none of this was within Nathan Glazer's orbit of experience when he wrote that
blacks have "no values and culture to guard and protect," or when he amended
this to imply, contradicting his own analysis of white ethnics, that the only
"real" culture is a foreign culture.

In contrast
to Glazer's vacuity, consider the account of the writer John Edgar Wideman:
"our stories, songs, dreams dances, social forms, style of walk, talk,
dressing, cooking, sport, our heroes and heroines provide a record... so
distinctive and abiding that its origins in culture have been misconstrued as
rooted in biology."Indeed,
Robert Park, the "father" of the race relations school at the University of
Chicago, speculated that blacks had a distinctive temperament that was
transmitted biologically, and accounted for their "genial, sunny, and social
disposition."

From Park
through Glazer, white sociology failed to apprehend - indeed, could not know -
that there is a distinctive African American culture that has roots in Africa
and evolved on American soil, first under slavery and later in those very
ghettos that white sociology portrayed mainly as sites of social
disorganization and cultural pathology. "That an African American aesthetic not
only survives but thrives and has been the vanguard of American cultural
expression," Caponi writes, "is a powerful testament to its vitality and
power."

"There is a distinctive African American culture
that has roots in Africa and evolved on American soil."

The
contemporary manifestation of this vibrant African American aesthetic is the
emergence of hip hop culture, and its florescence into a cultural phenomenon
that embraces music, dress, and graphic art. The profound impact of hip hop
culture on white youth has aroused consternation, however. "What are we of make
of a young white man from the suburbs," Charles Gallagher asks, "who listens to
hip-hop, wears baggy hip-hop pants, a baseball cap turned sideways, unlaced
sneakers and an oversized shirt emblazoned with a famous NBA player who, far
from shouting racial epithets, lists a number of racial minorities as his
heroes?"It is tempting to
see this as an important cultural exchange, one that marks a bridging of the
racial divide, as white youth identify with black performers and emulate the
black idiom of dress and self-presentation. Are white youth in a sense
"becoming black"? Does it imply a breach of the color line, potentially with
political consequences as these youth identify with the racial "other" and with
the black cause?

Critics
think otherwise. In an incisive article entitled "Blackophilia and
Blackophobia: White Youth, the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy,"
Bill Yousman contends that the white dalliance with hip hop culture is about
consumption and self-gratification, and hardly makes whites allies in the
struggle for racial justice. On the contrary, it reinforces the "otherness" of
blacks, and like black minstrelsy in past generations, provides white youth
with a template for projecting their own sexual anxieties and illicit desires.
To quote Yousman: "the images that White youth consume most voraciously are
images of Black violence, Black aggression, and Black misogyny and sexism. These
are the very same images that both mainstream conservative politicians and
far-right white supremacists invoke to justify regressive social policies or
violent ‘reprisals.'"

"The white dalliance with hip hop culture is about
consumption and self-gratification, and hardly makes whites allies in the
struggle for racial justice."

Another
astute critic, Robin Kelley, writes that gangsta rap "is a place of adventure,
unbridled violence, erotic fantasy, and/or an imaginary alternative to suburban
boredom."For blacks this
culture may represent a form of political resistance and protest against the
ravages of life in the hood. But for whites it amounts to voyeurism from the
safe distance of white privilege. As Yousman writes, "it is far too easy for
White youth to adopt the signifiers of Blackness when they do not have to deal
with the consequences of Blackness in America."Nor can it be assumed that these white youth even hear the
same music, or rather derive the same meaning from it. Consider Richard Wright's
penetrating observation some sixty-five years ago: "our music makes the whole
world dance.... But only a few of those who dance and sing with us suspect the
rawness of life out of which our laughing-crying tunes and quick steps come;
they do not know that our songs and dances are our banner of hope flung
desperately up in the face of a world that has pushed us to the wall."

Wright's
eloquence provides a conceptual lens for examining ongoing debates about the
impact of hip hop culture on black youth. Some commentators go so far as to
place the blame for the myriad of problems that confront black youth on hip hop
culture. A recent example is Orlando Patterson's op-ed piece in the New York
Times under the self-contradictory title, "A Poverty of the Mind." Reacting
to a number of recent studies documenting the crisis among black youth in terms
of schooling and jobs, Patterson asserts that the "standard explanatory fare"
of structural factors fails to explain the poor school performance of black
men, who also, or so he alleges, pass up low-wage jobs that immigrants are
willing to take. He locates the blame in black subculture, specifically the
"cool-pose culture" that is "simply too gratifying to give up." According to
Patterson, "For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the
street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party
drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar
athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black."
Patterson calls this "the Dionysian trap," an erudite spin on obsolete
culture-of-poverty theory.

"Patterson, from his ivory tower, inverts cause and
effect, and posits hip hop culture as a source of the overwhelming problems
that beset poor black youth."

Instead of
realizing that gangsta rap is a culture of alienation, a wail against the
hopelessness and degradation of the inner-city poor, "our banner of hope flung
desperately up in the face of a world that has pushed us to the wall,"
Patterson, from his ivory tower, inverts cause and effect, and posits hip hop
culture as a source of the overwhelming problems that beset poor black youth.
The effect is to blame these powerless people for their own degradation, and
even to begrudge our nation's youthful outcasts the ingenuity and creative
energy that drive hip hop culture, providing some outlet and solace for what
the legacy of slavery has wrought.

The
conclusion is unavoidable: America's melting pot has been inclusive of
everybody but blacks. Or to put it another way, we have a dual
melting pot: one for blacks, and the other for everybody else. This should
come as no surprise. Dualism has always been the ruling principle of race in
the United States: it began with the dualism between slave and free labor,
which itself was predicated on an ideological dualism between civilized and
primitive man. The dualism of Jim Crow. The dualism of segregated housing,
schools, cultural institutions, and the health care system. The dualism in the
sphere of everyday life, where blacks and whites live in different worlds. Not
to speak of the internal duality that Du Bois wrote about so luminously - the
double-consciousness of being both an American and a Negro, "two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body."The visionaries who imagine getting
"beyond race," "beyond ethnicity," "beyond multiculturalism" are sadly out of
touch with the events on the ground in the here and now. Perhaps the day will
come when their books will be lauded for their prescience, but at this moment
they seem strangely removed from the world we inhabit.

A number of
recent writers contend that there is an evolving "black" melting pot that will
absorb all of those groups who are phenotypically "black," including African
Americans, Caribbean immigrants, Afro-Latinos, and African immigrants.To be sure, these groups resist
being lumped together, and insist on being defined by nationality or ethnicity.
This was Mary Waters's finding in her study of West Indian immigrants and their
children in New York City, but to her surprise Waters also found that "hardly
anyone saw any problems with intermarrying with American blacks." Afro-Latinos
are marrying along racial lines as well. Among U.S.-born Puerto Rican males
aged twenty-five to thirty-four, 54 percent of those who self-identified as
white married non-Latino whites. The figure for those who identified as
non-white was only 27 percent, suggesting a tendency to "melt" along racial
lines.

"We have a dual melting pot: one for blacks, and the
other for everybody else."

If this
analysis is right, and groups that are phenotypically black are destined to
merge through intermarriage, the other melting pot will include everybody but
blacks, including Asians and light-skinned Latinos. This means that the
ballyhooed American melting pot is actually a racist formation, divided along
racial lines. It is a testament to the unremitting impact of racism, of a
nation that has stubbornly refused to confront its legacy of slavery and to
include African Americans in the circle of "we." I am tempted to say that the
dual melting pot reflects a failure of American democracy, but when we remember
that two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow were sanctioned by all
three branches of our government, it should come as no surprise that our
vaunted democratic institutions have failed to forge the basis for genuine
racial reconciliation.

Just think:
it required a long and bloody grassroots struggle in the second half of the
twentieth century just to attain the rights of citizenship that were supposedly
secured by the Reconstruction amendments and the Civil Rights act of 1875 that
guaranteed blacks equal treatment in all public accommodations. If this is
"progress," it is progress of a people on a historical treadmill.

Stephen Steinberg teaches in the Urban
Studies Department at Queens College. His most recent book Turning Back: The
Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy received the
Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. In
addition to his scholarly publications, he is a frequent contributor to New Politics. Email at [email protected].

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