"America has gone from a melting pot mentality to a Balkanized tribal mentality"
America was never a "melting pot. It is a salad bowl. Melting pot assumes blending and intermarriage. Both models of multicultural societies have contradictory aspects:
- in a melting pot there is no cultural diversity and sometimes differences are not respected;
- in a salad bowl cultures do not mix at all. And know this, in spite of the movies and TV shows, interracial marriage rates are actually still quite low, accounting for just 12% of all marriages in 2015, up from approximately 6% in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. Black-white marriages are particularly low, making up just 1.8% of all marriages. (Black woman and white man pairings, are the least common of all race-gender combinations.)
Beyond these numbers, societal acceptance of ethnically mixed unions is tepid at best. While most Americans support intermarriage in surveys, opposition to racial mixing is very real, especially the idea of it happening within one’s own family.
Respectfully, your concept of melting pot and mine are different. Regardless of the concept of intermarriage of any sort, be it religious, ethnic or racial, we are moving away from the tendency to accept and interact as individuals, to an "us vs them"
"America has gone from a melting pot mentality to a Balkanized tribal mentality"
America was never a "melting pot. It is a salad bowl. Melting pot assumes blending and intermarriage. Both models of multicultural societies have contradictory aspects:
- in a melting pot there is no cultural diversity and sometimes differences are not respected;
- in a salad bowl cultures do not mix at all. And know this, in spite of the movies and TV shows, interracial marriage rates are actually still quite low, accounting for just 12% of all marriages in 2015, up from approximately 6% in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. Black-white marriages are particularly low, making up just 1.8% of all marriages. (Black woman and white man pairings, are the least common of all race-gender combinations.)
Beyond these numbers, societal acceptance of ethnically mixed unions is tepid at best. While most Americans support intermarriage in surveys, opposition to racial mixing is very real, especially the idea of it happening within one’s own family.
Respectfully, your concept of melting pot and mine are different. Regardless of the concept of intermarriage of any sort, be it religious, ethnic or racial, we are moving away from the tendency to accept and interact as individuals, to an "us vs them"
mentality.