The Disuniting Of America Essay, Research Paper

America: One or Many?

The Disuniting of America by Arthur A. Schlesinger Jr. Norton. 1998. 208 pages

In The Disuniting of America, Arthur M. Schlesinger tells about the history of the new race of Americans. In the new republic civil commitment replaced bloodlines as the test for citizenship. The peoples of the new land where thrown into a crucible that forced the people to combine their skills and effort to solve their problems. Together different groups of people were able to build communities out of raw land. Wars such as the Civil War helped forge the self-image of Americans. Franklin D. Roosevelt said, Americanism is a matter of the mind and the heart; Americanism is not and never was a matter of ancestry.

Schlesinger writes that many people come to America and want to dive into the melting pot society and become an American. I think that the whole idea of the melting pot is getting rusty. A lot of people come to America to escape the harsh conditions of their home countries. They come to America because we offer a peaceful land with a large amount of freedom. Schlesinger writes, (Americans should) look forward to their prosterity rather than backward to their ancestry. He is saying that people should realize that they are part of a new nation and that past affiliations with religious or ethnic groups are not useful to themselves or to the nation. Immigrants who identify with the past are hurting the nation because it allows them to segregate themselves in ways that are meaningless to life in America.

I don t think that a total melting pot society will ever happen. No matter how many generations separate a person from his or her home land, a person always finds a way to identify with that place. Even on government forms you never see American as a race to choose from. Race is important in college admissions and that encourages young adults to emphasize racial attributes over individual characteristics. Today people try to become as different as they can from the next. The major thing that people take on is race.

An example of racial and ethnic over-emphasis in America is bilingual teaching in schools. Schlesinger says that he believes that parents of non-English speaking children would rather have them in a class that is all English all the time. English only classrooms insure that children are learning English. In bilingual classes they use too much Spanish and end up not teaching enough English. I agree with Schlesinger in this. Monolingual education opens up doors to the larger world. You need to have a large English vocabulary, knowledge of sentence structure and grammar to succeed in America.

Another example of the failure of the melting pot is racial segregation. In school, different parts of the yard are almost like traveling from one country to the next. You have the African Americans in one part, the Asian Americans in another, the Europeans somewhere else, and the rest of the minorities hardly exist. It s as if there was a tiny world with separate countries inside of the fences that surround the school. Classes such as Ethnic Studies are supposed to encourage association with the different races and ethnicities, but most of the time in class we focused on African Americans and how they were somehow different from the rest of us and that we should treat them better than others.

Racial categorization can be a crutch. Many try to use the excuse of being a disadvantaged race to get into jobs or schools instead of working hard. This leads to stereotyping and the growth of prejudice and legislation such as Affirmative Action.

In my family, we have an ethnically diverse melting pot. My mother is Mormon American Caucasian and my father is Chinese-born naturalized citizen. My mother s family came on the Mayflower. My father came on a boat with his two sisters. Though they have many differences they chose to emphasize their similarities. Both of their cultures find family very important. Chinese and Mormons each practice forms of ancestor worship. Both recently practiced polygamy. These shared customs in their backgrounds give my parents plenty of things to share and even more to laugh about.

People should focus more on similarities and less on differences. If we see ourselves as one people we may be more effective at addressing our differences in constructive and compassionate ways. This will make our society a fully developed melting pot.