America’s shifting ethnic landscape

At first glance, “Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American” looks like just another salvo by right-wingers against three of conservatives’ betes noires: bilingual education, affirmative action and the ideology that is called multiculturalism.

Indeed, Tamar Jacoby, editor of this collection of 22 original essays, scorns the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling supporting affirmative action at the University of Michigan law school, and several of the authors are connected with the conservative Manhattan Institute and write for publications such as the Wall Street Journal (editorial page) and the Weekly Standard.

It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss this anthology as a rightist polemic. Most of the essays are careful, reasoned assessments of the current state of immigration and immigrants in a nation that constantly renews itself with newcomers.

Columbia University sociologist Herbert J. Gans, one of the nation’s leaders in immigration studies, writes sensibly that for “the foreseeable future, in the real America, immigration is likely to continue bringing new racial groups and new ethnic cultures to our shores all the time. Assimilation will continue, but so will the shifting patterns of the American kaleidoscope, which will remain the quintessential image of what it means to be American.”

Harvard University historian Stephan Thernstrom writes that assimilation into the melting pot “is just as strong today as it was in the past.” He goes so far as to suggest that “given the power and success of assimilation so far in American history, my bet is that by the time we have a ‘minority majority’ in the United States, no one will notice it.”

Assimilation as a positive came under attack in the 1960s by advocates of Black Power and some Latinos who feared being pressured to conform to a white-dominated society. They advocated multiculturalism, a salad bowl mix of separate, not blended American identities. Conservatives -- some of whom wanted to preserve exactly the domination others feared -- warned darkly of a splintered America and strenuously condemned multiculturalism.

Jacoby still writes somewhat in that vein. In her introduction she argues that “multiculturalism has become the civil religion of the United States.” But the authors she has included here mostly belie so simplistic an approach.

They point out that the great diversity of immigrants, the enormous increase in the Latino population and the rapidly rising rate of intermarriage among ethnic and racial groups of Americans require a more nuanced view of who we are.

Gregory Rodriguez, a contributing editor to The Times’ Opinion section and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writes that in the first half of the 20th century Mexican Americans fought for the same privileges whites enjoyed in this country, then in the 1960s, activists began to struggle for the benefits of being nonwhite.

Now, he says, “Having spent so long trying to fit into one side or the other of the binary system, Mexican-Americans have become numerous and confident enough to simply claim their brownness -- their mestizaje. By bringing this ancient understanding of racial and cultural synthesis to a nation that itself is rapidly mixing, Mexican-Americans are transforming the melting pot into a more inclusive cauldron that mixes races as well as ethnicities.”

The great stumbling block on the road to the melting pot is, as always, the dilemma for African American descendants of slaves. Intermarriage between them and other Americans is rising, but not as fast as between other groups. The celebration of black identity remains powerful, as does the recognition of a special place for African Americans in U.S. law and society because of grievous past wrongs.

John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, will please some but by no means all fellow African Americans when he writes provocatively that “the only salvation we can seek is to brace ourselves for the eclipse of ‘black identity.’ ” In that, he argues, “we will take our place as immigrants to America.” Like a few others in this book, McWhorter’s essay is too professorially neat to match the pain and grit of real life. But despite the obvious ideological roots of this collection, most of the essays are balanced and informed rather than strident. Together they make a useful contribution for looking into, what Gans calls “the shifting patterns of the American kaleidoscope.”