THE DUAL MELTING POT

by BAR contributing editor Stephen Steinberg, Black Agenda Report























There is a "melting pot" of all the races of Europe in America, but it does not include African Americans. It may someday include light-skinned Hispanics, and everybody else but Blacks. The American paradigm of race requires that there be an "other" - and the other is Black people. That's what makes white people, white. African Americans for some time have been demonstrating that they reject assimilation into a house that does not want them, by taking on their own names and holidays. No one should be fooled by white youth embrace of Hip Hop culture - a form of commercial consumption, rather than political conversion. It ain't real.

This article is excerpted from Dr. Steinberg's book, Race Relations: A Critique, published in September by Stanford University Press. The text preceding the excerpt criticizes sociologists for advancing "an epistemology of wishful thinking" that denies the reality of the melting pot.

"....Like it or not - and the dissent of the multiculturalists is clear - assimilation is the wave of the future, the inexorable byproduct of forces put into motion by the act of immigration itself."

Admittedly, this is a sweeping conclusion. While I believe that it captures the main thrust of American ethnic history, it does not tell the whole story. In particular, it does not account for the African American exception. Here we speak of a group that came to America in slave galleys, not immigrant vessels. While successive waves of immigrants flowed into the country, first to settle the land mass and later to provide labor for burgeoning industries, blacks were trapped in the South in a system of feudal agriculture. Even in the North, a rigid color line excluded them from the manufacturing sector, except for a few dirty, backbreaking, and dangerous jobs that whites spurned. In effect, the industrial revolution was "for whites only," depriving blacks of the jobs and opportunities that delivered Europe's huddled masses from poverty.

This was the historic wrong that was supposed to be remedied by landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. However, by the time large numbers of blacks arrived in northern cities, the manufacturing sector was undergoing a long-term decline, reflecting the impact of laborsaving technology and the export of jobs to low-wage countries. Not only did blacks encounter a far less favorable structure of opportunity than did immigrants, not only did they suffer from the economic consequences of past discrimination, not only did they continue to encounter pervasive racism in the world of work, but they also encountered intense labor competition from yet another huge wave of immigrants. Ironically, most of these immigrants would not be here but for the civil rights movement that led to the overhaul of immigration policy in 1965.

The standard cant is that immigrants take jobs that blacks don't want, but this is a partial truth at best. Immigrants have made inroads into every segment of the workforce, including coveted jobs in the health care industries, construction, building maintenance, light manufacturing, and even government service, which has long been the staple of the black middle class. Nor are immigrants any longer restricted to a few gateway cities. Increasingly, they are penetrating all regions of the nation and all segments of the American economy, as is their aspiration and their right. Without doubt the continuing flow of immigrants has been a boon to the national economy, but it has also dealt a blow to African Americans who were poised for progress in the wake of the Civil Rights Revolution.

Notwithstanding their "racial" differences and the many impediments that they confront, the new immigrants have been able to bypass blacks on the proverbial road to success. As I argued above, this is also a road that ultimately leads into the melting pot. It is a mark of the melting pot's failure that African Americans, whose roots on American soil go back to the founding of the nation, are today more segregated than recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America. According to Douglas S. Massey, "no other ethnic or racial group in the United states has ever, even briefly, experienced such high levels of residential segregation." What clearer manifestation of African American exceptionalism could there be?

All the while that Zangwill's melting pot was "roaring and bubbling," and Europe's "races" were amalgamating into whites, thirty states had antimiscegenation laws proscribing marriages between blacks and whites. Sixteen of these states still had these laws on the books when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional in 1967. Even today, at a time when marriage across racial lines has been soaring for Asians and Latinos, it has inched up only slightly for blacks (to 6 percent for males and 2 percent for females).

Not only do blacks bear the brunt of exclusion, but there is also evidence that many blacks actively reject the melting pot. At least this can be inferred from baby naming practices. In A Matter of Taste, Stanley Lieberson found that black and white naming conventions were similar early in the century, but diverged sharply after the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1960s.

Blacks developed a custom of finding unique names, often derived from African languages, or coining entirely new names. A recent study based on California's birth data found that "more than 40 percent of black girls were given names that were not given to even one of the more than 100,000 white girls born in the state the same year." In New York City, the five most popular names for black girls in 2005 were Kayla, Jada, Madison, Destiny, and Brianna. For boys they are Joshua, Elijah, Justin, Jayden, and Isaiah. With the exception of Justin, which is popular among Asians and Latinos, these names have little currency among other groups. If it is true, as I contended earlier, that the naming practices among Asians and Latinos indicate that these groups are on a path into the melting pot, then the naming practices among blacks suggest the opposite: that blacks are defiantly running away from the melting pot. Not without penalty, however. Recent studies report that employers often discriminate against applicants who have conspicuously "black" names.

There are other ways in which it can be said that blacks are "running away from the melting pot." At the same time that immigrants were losing their ancestral languages, blacks were forging an African American dialect, one that, according to sociolinguists, has all of the defining attributes of a legitimate language. Another example is the emergence of Kwanzaa as an African American variant of Christmas. As Elizabeth Pleck has shown, this was the invention of black nationalists in the 1970s, but over time has evolved into a celebration of family and blackness. By themselves, these developments may not be all that important, but they are important insofar as they reflect deeper trends of identity, culture, and community.

Here we confront the major point of difference between African Americans and immigrants so far as the issue of culture is concerned. For immigrants, the ethnic community was a transitional phenomenon that facilitated their movement, geographically and socially, into the mainstream of society. To be sure, economically mobile immigrants exhibited a pattern of resegregation, as Louis Wirth observed, as they attempted to rebuild churches and other institutions that were essential to their collective survival. They did not simply flop into the melting pot and melt into oblivion. However, we now have the verdict of history, though some will still deny it: these ethnic communities were destined to a gradual and inexorable decline across generations.

For African Americans it was another matter altogether: the ghetto was a permanent fact of life. And here we confront a great historical paradox - for these ghettos, the enforced home of the nation's racial pariahs, also spawned and nourished a vibrant African American subculture. Again, the contrast with immigrants is striking, as Bob Blauner argued in Racial Oppression in America.

Whereas the immigrant ghettos allowed ethnic cultures to flower for a period, in the long term they functioned as way stations on the road to acculturation and assimilation. But the black ghetto has served as a central fixture of American racism's strong resistance to the assimilation of black people. Thus the ghetto's permanence has made it a continuing crucible for ethnic development and culture building.

Thus, the supreme paradox: precisely because of its permanence, the ghetto functions as "a continuing crucible for ethnic development and culture building." It is precisely because no other ethnic or racial group in the United States has ever experienced such prolonged levels of residential segregation that the ecological and social prerequisites did not exist for ethnic persistence and renewal.

Other differences ensue from the simple fact that blacks were not immigrants. Unlike immigrants, who clung to vestiges of cultures ripped from their moorings in distant places, black culture evolved out of the lived experience of black people on American soil. Instead of isolated fragments selected precisely because they did not interfere with mainstream American culture, black culture is an integral part of the everyday lives of black people. In short, it is a living culture, one that displays a vitality and dynamism that is generally lacking among the atrophying cultures of the nation's immigrant groups.

Ironically, generations of sociologists have taken the opposite position, on the one hand valorizing the rich cultures of the nation's immigrants, and on the other, holding that blacks were "only white men with black skin, nothing more, nothing less," as Kenneth Stampp wrote in the preface to The Peculiar Institution. The further irony is that this position had liberal intentions. It was the way that white liberals avowed that blacks are "just like us" but for the happenstance of skin color. It was meant as a compliment, however much it was predicated on myopia and condescension.

This is how Nathan Glazer came to commit a major gaffe. In Beyond the Melting Pot, in which he and Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared that ethnic groups survived the melting pot, Glazer wrote: "it is not possible for Negroes to view themselves as other ethnic groups viewed themselves because - and this is the key to much in the Negro world - the Negro is an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect." This was 1963, before the upsurge of black militancy and the eruption of the "soul movement" that celebrated and rejuvenated black culture. By 1970 Glazer came under fierce attack, and in the second edition, he confessed, albeit in fine print, that his statement had given him "considerable pain." All that he meant, he now explained, was that blacks have no foreign culture to guard and protect. However, this only compounds the error! These foreign cultures - precisely because they were foreign - were destined to a gradual but inexorable decline. In contrast, black culture is a bona fide example of ethnogenesis - literally, the genesis of new cultural forms that evolved through interaction with American culture, a far cry from the fraught attempts of immigrants to cling to shards of the past. Moreover, as an indigenous product of the American experience, black culture continues not only to thrive in segregated black communities but also to exert a powerful influence on mainstream American culture.

In an edited collection, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', and Slam Dunking, Gena Dagel Caponi and her collaborators make a powerful case that there is - always has been - a distinctive African American aesthetic that runs through music, dance, sport (hence the inclusion of slam dunking), and oral expression. The vitality and dynamism of this aesthetic derives, not from tutelage, but from the lived experience of ordinary people. This is captured in an evocative passage from an autobiographical book by Johnny Otis, a white rhythm and blues artist who grew up in a black neighborhood in Berkeley, California:

"I never had to instruct my horn players how to phrase a passage.... The music grew out of the African American way of life. The way mama cooked, the Black English grandmother and grandfather spoke, the way daddy disciplined the kids - the emphasis on spiritual values, the way Reverend Jones preached, the way Sister Williams sang in the choir, the way the old brother down the street played the slide guitar and crooned the blues, the very special way the people danced, walked, laughed, cried, joked, got happy, shouted in church. In the final analysis, what forms the texture and adds character to the music is the African American experience."

Clearly, none of this was within Nathan Glazer's orbit of experience when he wrote that blacks have "no values and culture to guard and protect," or when he amended this to imply, contradicting his own analysis of white ethnics, that the only "real" culture is a foreign culture.

In contrast to Glazer's vacuity, consider the account of the writer John Edgar Wideman: "our stories, songs, dreams dances, social forms, style of walk, talk, dressing, cooking, sport, our heroes and heroines provide a record... so distinctive and abiding that its origins in culture have been misconstrued as rooted in biology." Indeed, Robert Park, the "father" of the race relations school at the University of Chicago, speculated that blacks had a distinctive temperament that was transmitted biologically, and accounted for their "genial, sunny, and social disposition."

From Park through Glazer, white sociology failed to apprehend - indeed, could not know - that there is a distinctive African American culture that has roots in Africa and evolved on American soil, first under slavery and later in those very ghettos that white sociology portrayed mainly as sites of social disorganization and cultural pathology. "That an African American aesthetic not only survives but thrives and has been the vanguard of American cultural expression," Caponi writes, "is a powerful testament to its vitality and power."

The contemporary manifestation of this vibrant African American aesthetic is the emergence of hip hop culture, and its florescence into a cultural phenomenon that embraces music, dress, and graphic art. The profound impact of hip hop culture on white youth has aroused consternation, however. "What are we of make of a young white man from the suburbs," Charles Gallagher asks, "who listens to hip-hop, wears baggy hip-hop pants, a baseball cap turned sideways, unlaced sneakers and an oversized shirt emblazoned with a famous NBA player who, far from shouting racial epithets, lists a number of racial minorities as his heroes?" It is tempting to see this as an important cultural exchange, one that marks a bridging of the racial divide, as white youth identify with black performers and emulate the black idiom of dress and self-presentation. Are white youth in a sense "becoming black"? Does it imply a breach of the color line, potentially with political consequences as these youth identify with the racial "other" and with the black cause?

Critics think otherwise. In an incisive article entitled "Blackophilia and Blackophobia: White Youth, the Consumption of Rap Music, and White Supremacy," Bill Yousman contends that the white dalliance with hip hop culture is about consumption and self-gratification, and hardly makes whites allies in the struggle for racial justice. On the contrary, it reinforces the "otherness" of blacks, and like black minstrelsy in past generations, provides white youth with a template for projecting their own sexual anxieties and illicit desires. To quote Yousman: "the images that White youth consume most voraciously are images of Black violence, Black aggression, and Black misogyny and sexism. These are the very same images that both mainstream conservative politicians and far-right white supremacists invoke to justify regressive social policies or violent ‘reprisals.'"

Another astute critic, Robin Kelley, writes that gangsta rap "is a place of adventure, unbridled violence, erotic fantasy, and/or an imaginary alternative to suburban boredom." For blacks this culture may represent a form of political resistance and protest against the ravages of life in the hood. But for whites it amounts to voyeurism from the safe distance of white privilege. As Yousman writes, "it is far too easy for White youth to adopt the signifiers of Blackness when they do not have to deal with the consequences of Blackness in America." Nor can it be assumed that these white youth even hear the same music, or rather derive the same meaning from it. Consider Richard Wright's penetrating observation some sixty-five years ago: "our music makes the whole world dance.... But only a few of those who dance and sing with us suspect the rawness of life out of which our laughing-crying tunes and quick steps come; they do not know that our songs and dances are our banner of hope flung desperately up in the face of a world that has pushed us to the wall."

Wright's eloquence provides a conceptual lens for examining ongoing debates about the impact of hip hop culture on black youth. Some commentators go so far as to place the blame for the myriad of problems that confront black youth on hip hop culture. A recent example is Orlando Patterson's op-ed piece in the New York Times under the self-contradictory title, "A Poverty of the Mind." Reacting to a number of recent studies documenting the crisis among black youth in terms of schooling and jobs, Patterson asserts that the "standard explanatory fare" of structural factors fails to explain the poor school performance of black men, who also, or so he alleges, pass up low-wage jobs that immigrants are willing to take. He locates the blame in black subculture, specifically the "cool-pose culture" that is "simply too gratifying to give up." According to Patterson, "For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black." Patterson calls this "the Dionysian trap," an erudite spin on obsolete culture-of-poverty theory.

Instead of realizing that gangsta rap is a culture of alienation, a wail against the hopelessness and degradation of the inner-city poor, "our banner of hope flung desperately up in the face of a world that has pushed us to the wall," Patterson, from his ivory tower, inverts cause and effect, and posits hip hop culture as a source of the overwhelming problems that beset poor black youth. The effect is to blame these powerless people for their own degradation, and even to begrudge our nation's youthful outcasts the ingenuity and creative energy that drive hip hop culture, providing some outlet and solace for what the legacy of slavery has wrought.

The conclusion is unavoidable: America's melting pot has been inclusive of everybody but blacks. Or to put it another way, we have a dual melting pot: one for blacks, and the other for everybody else. This should come as no surprise. Dualism has always been the ruling principle of race in the United States: it began with the dualism between slave and free labor, which itself was predicated on an ideological dualism between civilized and primitive man. The dualism of Jim Crow. The dualism of segregated housing, schools, cultural institutions, and the health care system. The dualism in the sphere of everyday life, where blacks and whites live in different worlds. Not to speak of the internal duality that Du Bois wrote about so luminously - the double-consciousness of being both an American and a Negro, "two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." The visionaries who imagine getting "beyond race," "beyond ethnicity," "beyond multiculturalism" are sadly out of touch with the events on the ground in the here and now. Perhaps the day will come when their books will be lauded for their prescience, but at this moment they seem strangely removed from the world we inhabit.

A number of recent writers contend that there is an evolving "black" melting pot that will absorb all of those groups who are phenotypically "black," including African Americans, Caribbean immigrants, Afro-Latinos, and African immigrants. To be sure, these groups resist being lumped together, and insist on being defined by nationality or ethnicity. This was Mary Waters's finding in her study of West Indian immigrants and their children in New York City, but to her surprise Waters also found that "hardly anyone saw any problems with intermarrying with American blacks." Afro-Latinos are marrying along racial lines as well. Among U.S.-born Puerto Rican males aged twenty-five to thirty-four, 54 percent of those who self-identified as white married non-Latino whites. The figure for those who identified as non-white was only 27 percent, suggesting a tendency to "melt" along racial lines.

If this analysis is right, and groups that are phenotypically black are destined to merge through intermarriage, the other melting pot will include everybody but blacks, including Asians and light-skinned Latinos. This means that the ballyhooed American melting pot is actually a racist formation, divided along racial lines. It is a testament to the unremitting impact of racism, of a nation that has stubbornly refused to confront its legacy of slavery and to include African Americans in the circle of "we." I am tempted to say that the dual melting pot reflects a failure of American democracy, but when we remember that two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow were sanctioned by all three branches of our government, it should come as no surprise that our vaunted democratic institutions have failed to forge the basis for genuine racial reconciliation.

Just think: it required a long and bloody grassroots struggle in the second half of the twentieth century just to attain the rights of citizenship that were supposedly secured by the Reconstruction amendments and the Civil Rights act of 1875 that guaranteed blacks equal treatment in all public accommodations. If this is "progress," it is progress of a people on a historical treadmill.

Stephen Steinberg teaches in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College. His most recent book Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. In addition to his scholarly publications, he is a frequent contributor to New Politics. Email at ssteinberg1@gc.cuny.eduThis email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

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