Diversity

One kind of diversity, ethnic diversity among white Americans, is not much recognized in the current discourse on diversity, or in policies that recognize or respond to diversity. Yet before diversity became a prevailing concept to recognize and appreciate significant differences among Americans, other concepts—such as the "melting pot" and "cultural pluralism"—emerged to respond to and recognize ethnic differences among white Europeans (though they were then not all necessarily considered "white"). These concepts emerged because the large new immigrant groups of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Jews, Italians, Poles, Slavic groups, Greeks, and others from eastern and southern Europe and the Near East—were seen as different from and inferior to previous immigrants from Great Britain and northern and western Europe, and were subject to various degrees of discrimination.

The concept of the melting pot was given wide circulation by the popular play of that name, written by the English Jewish writer Israel Zangwill in 1908. But there are earlier parallels to the melting pot in the works of the nineteenth-century American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. The melting pot concept disputes the assumption of inferiority of the newer immigrants that was so widespread among scholars and political leaders in the early twentieth century. It implies the equality of all European groups and their equal qualifications and right to form part of and merge into the common American people. While it has on the whole a positive and benign import, the melting pot gives no acknowledgment to the idea that these groups to be merged into Anglo-America might resist assimilation, might want to cling to differences in culture and language and religion. Associated with the prevailing melting pot ideology of the early twentieth century were programs of "Americanization," the teaching of English and American history and political practice. These became particularly intense and intrusive during World War I, when it was widely feared that immigrant and ethnic groups would respond to this crisis by taking the part of their native countries, rather than as assimilated Americans.

The melting pot was then countered by a new ideology of "cultural pluralism," formulated in World War I by the philosopher Horace Kallen, who argued that America could be a symphony of diverse cultural strands that resisted forceful assimilation and Americanization. The condition of American blacks played no role in the philosophy of cultural pluralism—it referred only to European immigrants. But cultural pluralism was a rather isolated concept, advocated by few and overwhelmed by the rush to assimilation. It emerged under other names and forms in World War II—for example, "intercultural education"—because in that war the buried identifications with European homeland were seen as aiding the American war effort rather than countering American loyalty; German dictator Adolf Hitler had oppressed so many people who could be energized to oppose him. The appreciation of difference that emerged in World War II and the postwar world now began to include blacks. Hitler's racism was the enemy. Could American racism be unaffected? As American racism became for the first time since Reconstruction part of the national American political agenda, the stage was set for the civil rights revolution, civil rights legislation, and the canonization of diversity.