Melting pot or salad bowl or both? This is good question, and it is a question not easily answered. The experiences that I have to analyze this question come not from the classroom, as I am not a working teacher, but from my own past experiences living on a multi-cultural university campus.
Serving primarily African-American, Asian, Caucasian, Indian, and Turkish populations, the university sought to create experiences that promoted a multi-cultural education. Sadly, the events that were designed to celebrate diversity, seemed to only create social clubs and barriers. What I began to discover was that the salad bowl and the melting pot very much live in co-existence with one another, both adding to, taking away, and preserving racial/ethnic prejudices.
Walk into any large eatery on campus and you will see ethnic groups sitting with ethnic groups. For example, I noticed that international students often stuck with other international students, speaking their own language in all public situations and dressing to their culture. Very little mixing happened in casual social scenarios as far as I could tell. But, because I was an event planner on campus, I would often work with many different people. One event in particular, a pool tournament, attracted a large amount of international students. Often, when I asked for their name, they would give me their “American” name. With people who spoke their language, I never heard that name used. Likewise, I had a good friend who was not Caucasian, who was going into business. Over time, I noticed that how he spoke in certain situations started to change. When he was conducting himself in a professional manner, he would speak like what some might call “white.” This friend of mine was even told by his academic advisor that he could not wear his hair in naturally in dreads because no one would take him seriously. From what I can see, a salad bowl where cultures are preserved and celebrated happens only in safe circumstances while mainstreamed cultures, such as business, takes on the ideals of the melting pot.
I am worried about how the notions of a melting pot and salad bowl society both heighten and ease tensions in our society. By maintaining and preserving a culture within the bounds of that population, others remain ignorant. Yet, mainstream culture demands assimilation in exchange for success. In the article “Whites in Multi-Cultural Education: Rethinking our Role,” Gary Howard (1996) suggests that “the issue of racism and cultural diversity in the United States is a human problem” that we as humans must take “co-responsibility” in solving (p.330). If this is the case, I think that we as a people may want to come up with a new model to explain our society. Melting pot and salad bowl—well, I just don’t think that these ideas assist us in creating new ways of relating to and celebrating one another. Right now, our options are to assimilate and segregate simultaneously. There must be another way.
Tessa Saylor 