Really, How Different Are We? : Needed: A middle-ground approach stressing commonalities too

The “melting pot” theory held that all Americans could and should seek to blend the nation’s various cultures. The problem was that too often Americans were melted down for a single mold--European Christian. Sameness was valued, differentness scorned.

The more recently in-vogue “particularism” approach tells Americans that they should understand and place value on their particular ethnicity and culture to boost their ethnic pride and self-esteem. But too often that winds up meaning that differentness and separateness are stressed while commonalities are ignored.

Isn’t there a middle-ground approach that can stress commonalities while also placing value on the nation’s rich mix of ethnic backgrounds and cultures? That’s the question more and more educators are discussing, and it’s high time.

“I think many people, especially in the post-Rodney King era, are beginning to realize that we can’t just study ourselves as separate groups,” Ronald Takaki, ethnic studies professor at UC Berkeley, told Times staff writer Sharon Bernstein. “We’ve gone beyond the need to recover identity and roots, and now we’re realizing that our paths as members of different groups are crisscrossing each other.”

No one wants to return to the days when a Euro-centric culture made many blacks, Latinos and Asians feel like outer-space aliens in their own nation; but too much emphasis on what separates us can deepen divisions. Listen to a 17-year-old Latina quoted in this week’s Voices section: “Just because I’m Mexican, (people) think I want to be barefoot and pregnant. That’s not what I want. . . . My stereotype of African-Americans is that they all try to be loud and disruptive. I hate myself for doing that, because I hate it when they (stereotype) me.”

Ethnic pride doesn’t mean ethnic chauvinism. Los Angeles doesn’t want and can’t survive a future in which it would be, as in the words of one writer, “the Yugoslavia of U.S. cities.” Educators--some of whom unintentionally helped foster this my-group-over-your-group thinking--must now help the nation learn anew what bonds us all.