U.S. melting pot is still simmering

Is the United States really the world’s great melting pot, where people of various races, religions and ethnic groups are inexorably melding into a workably unified whole? Or has the quest for maintaining cultural identities changed the recipe into a mixed salad, with the ingredients tossed together yet retaining their distinct textures and flavors?

The provocative and prickly issues therein are nearly as old as the country itself, but the elements of the debate are examined anew in a probing four-part PBS series, “Matters of Race.” Parts 1 and 2 air tonight at 9 and 10 on KCET, with the third and fourth of the hourlong segments set for Wednesday in the same time slots.

Tonight’s initial installment takes viewers to Siler City, N.C., where an influx of undocumented immigrants from Mexico has been triggering fundamental changes in the community. For years a deeply segregated town where blacks only came to the city proper to perform service-oriented jobs for the white majority, Siler City has been split again by the newcomers, who have eagerly scooped up whatever lower-rung jobs were available.

But as if their foreign language and customs weren’t off-putting enough for the white and, to a lesser degree, the black residents, the new pressures on city services and the school system worry everyone.

“We’ve welcomed people here to visit,” says Rev. Neal Kight of the local Church of God, “but they’re staying, and they’re impacting all our society.”

“For a long time we did the work no one else wanted to do,” added community activist Linda Jean Ferguson, who is black. “But now it’s different.”

Yet when a placard-waving rally against the immigrants draws former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke as a guest speaker, members of the black community rise in protest. “It’s unconscionable,” the Rev. Carrie H. Bolton says.

The documentary, which in Part 2 tonight examines the polarities of race via a stop at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles, brilliantly uses the voices of all the people involved to tell its story.

And one of the most eloquent, author Eric Liu, questions the staying power as well as the validity of the divisiveness.

“Race, at the end of the day, is a fiction,” he says. “The mixed shall inherit the Earth.”