The Mess They Call Multiculturalism

By David Kessel, American Chronicle

March 10, 2006

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=6752

Have you ever noticed how the term “Multi-Cultural” is often applied to the British colonies such as the US, Canada, Australia, and even Malaysia and Singapore, and how few other countries who were not British possessions give themselves such a description? The Soviet Union was a multi-national country and so was Yugoslavia but they were never called “multi-cultural”. Countries in South America have a more rigid class system, but, by and large, the Spanish or Portuguese models have never been called multi-cultural to my knowledge.

I have, on several occasions, come upon a few ultra-right websites who complain that certain elements in America ( such as Jews and Liberals) are aiming at diluting the US "racial purity" by bringing in "non-white immigrants" and turning the US into a multi-cultural nightmare.

There are, on the other hand, left-leaning groups who glorify multi-culturalism and proclaim that it serves everyone's interest to preserve our diversity; that the US has always been a nation of [legal] immigrants, and that it should stay that way.

Somehow, I feel that both sides are missing the point, so, being a centrist, I would like to give you my own take on how the much-lauded, much-vilified multiculturalism came about.

When the US was founded, it was primarily an English colony. Because it broke away from England, it sought to do away with a lot of class restrictions of the old society, so, official documents were written and enshrined to create a country based on the principle that ‘all men were created equal‘. The other principle as important in outlining American social philosophy was the "self-evidence" that people born or naturalized in the United States were, by virtue of that, US citizens.

Other countries were not like that and still aren’t. You can be born in Korea, but if you are not Korean by blood, you are not Korean. That’s just how it is there. You can be born in Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi nationality is not given to you because of that. Getting citizenship in those societies is hard, and even if you ever manage to get it, you will still never be one of them in social terms.

In America, these two principles should have been enough to create a veritable melting pot where people would harmoniously and naturally mix with one another and thus create a great American nationality. The same way as it happened in Brazil. However, there were also opposing principles in the US culture of those times which did not allow the One Nation Under God to truly develop, and, instead, lead to several parallel ethno-cultures arising in its place.

1) The birth of the "white" identity.

Most Europeans are not aware of the fact that they are “white”, and do not think of themselves as ‘white‘. Germans think of themselves as Germans, and Poles think of themselves as Poles. The British were English, Scottish or Welsh, not "white". The term 'white' originated during the colonial times, when various Western conquerors came upon the shores of continents where people had a darker pigmentation than these colonists did. Still, in many Spanish colonies, the conquistadors thought of themselves more as ‘Spaniards’ than ‘whites‘. It was in the English colonies that the 'white' self-nomination became the strongest....

After the Native Americans had been pushed out and the Founding Fathers had a “white”, mostly ethnically “English” nation in America, they, very contradictorily to their own plans, did not keep it that way. I guess, becoming wealthy was more important. So, they went ahead and brought slaves from Africa. Why? Well, you see, they faced a “labor shortage”, and importing the English was probably too expensive. Slaves worked for free....

Black people from Africa did not think of themselves as Black, either, until they came to America. They thought of themselves by the name of tribes that they belonged to....

2) The English snobberies:

The first settlers brought a lot of the Old World, uniquely English snobberies with them. The main one was that anyone who was not English and /or who did not act, speak or look English was somehow inferior. Being an American in those times meant to be ‘English’, or, at least, talk and behave like one and have an English name to boot....

When the Irish and, later, the Germans, the Italians and the East European Jews arrived, they came up against these merciless English snobberies. Instead of being embraced into a “melting pot”, many were kept at a distance by the people who had come before them and were not accepted as true Americans for a long time. If you had a non-English name, a foreign accent or, God forbid, spoke a foreign language, and did not behave as the original British settlers, you faced ostracism. You were kept at an arm’s length and treated as an outsider....

The reaction of the new native-born Americans was to assert pride in their origin, and hyphenate themselves. “I am proud to be an Italian- American! “, “I am proud to be an Irish-American! “ Such hyphenated pride was often simply a backlash to the snootiness of the first English settlers....

No such phenomenon took place in South America. People there simply became Argentineans, Uruguayans and Panamanians, although many were from the same countries as the immigrants that came to the US....

None of these American ethno- identifying terms helped in creating a single American identity, but rather, further paved the way to what we now know as Multi-Culturalism.

To give the South American example again, if you take a nation like Chile, you will learn that their national hero was of Irish background and his name was Bernardo O’Higgins. However, he is not known as an “Irish-Chilean Liberator“; just a “Chilean” one....

If you come from another country and move to the United States, you will soon feel the pressure to join one of these ‘tribes’ and abandon your original identity as a Thai, a Peruvian or a German. No, you do not melt into America. You melt into a White America, a Black America, an Asian or a Hispanic America...This is how these things developed over two centuries and this is now the official policy of the government, schools and workplace....

Politicians and liberal elements exploit this “Five-Nations in One” divisions to get votes, pitch one group of people against another, while the ultra right elements declare this to be a Jewish conspiracy to obliterate the “white nation” in order to make America safe for the Jews.

Very few people in the US are trying to forge an American national unity on creating an identity that is just purely “American” which is how it should be....

3) Guilt-ridden Liberals.

...instead of teaching everybody that people should be just Americans and One Nation under God, and that we should all just be nice to our fellow man, the guilt-ridden elements try and correct the past wrongs by simplifying the problem and applying many broad measures across the board while hurting innocent people in the process.

The new philosophy is this- “We have the following protected species in this country- the African-Americans (never use the horrible word “Black“!), the Asians (do not use the word “Oriental”, it is not PC!), the Native Americans (do not say “Indian“, please!), and the Hispanics which rarely includes Spaniards or Argentineans of German descent. Now, we have to promote these and protect them by law but against whom? Mainly, against the whites. But who are the whites? They are now a bunch of Italians, Jews, Irishmen and other such groups who had been for a long time discriminated against by the English descendants, as well....

4) Profit is almost always above racial or national solidarity.

For a long time now, an average white American employer, a “John Smith” has discovered that hiring a Jose Rodriguez from Mexico costs less than hiring another John Smith from the US. Jose Rodriguez will work for less because his family is often in Mexico, and Mexico is cheaper than the US. $50 a day is a fortune in Mexico. Jose Rodriguez is working hard and is very happy with his job. But the other John Smith, the employee, is complaining that he is not making enough. The Smiths live in the US; not Mexico. School tuition is high, housing is expensive. He wants more money. ‘To hell with a fellow John Smith,” says the Gringo employer-“I am hiring Jose Rodriguez who is here illegally. I’ll save money in the process and make a fatter profit.”

In the US, when it comes to money, profit by any means possible often takes precedence over race, nationality, ethnic origin, citizenship or patriotism....

...It is not about race. It is about the cost of labor....

...Forces of economics are what is shaping the US ethnic demographics, not some fantasy meetings by mythical Elders of Zion in Williamsburg....

...The school systems and the government’s unscientific and artificial ethnic classifications further divide people by giving them unnatural identities that have no equivalent in the countries where these people had originally come from.

Somehow we cannot seem to be able to correct the situation by following the Latin American example; we simply cannot teach in schools what many other countries in the Americas teach their kids: “You are all Panamanians“, “You are all Venezuelans“or “You are all Brazilians“. “You are all Americans” is hardly ever taught.

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