Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?

Historically, I think it's fair to say that the United States has collectively self-identified as a crossroads of cultures - a national state based not on a particular ethnic, cultural, or religious background, but instead a particular philosophy emphasizing individual freedom and responsibility.  Naturally, there are elements in the U.S. that would contest this (read: the subset of the population that wants to stick monuments of the Ten Commandments in front of courthouses or fearmongers about the relative decline of Caucasians as a percentage of the population), but I think it's fair to see that these sorts of opinions are on the fringe.  In any case, I think very few people would publicly claim that someone was less American because they also happened to be muslim or buddhist or latino or asian (or what have you).

The popular analogy used to be the Melting Pot: the place where disparate ingredients come to be united in one continuous, indistinguishable whole.  In recent decades, however, the authenticity of that analogy has been challenged.  No one can argue that America contains diverse, cohabitating ingredients, and each one absorbs some flavor from its neighbors, but some people think that these different elements ultimately retain their distinct characters.  I'm not writing today to weigh in on which of these two is a more accurate characterization, but to make some comments in a broader context - how the U.S. compares on this sliding identity scale relative to other places I've visited.

Long story short:America certainly isn't an ideal melting point (not to imply that's a desirable thing), but it's much closer to the melty end of the spectrum than most of the rest of the world.

I gradually came to this conclusion after a series of conversations with people in Africa in Europe that began with someone saying to me, "Americans are x" (sometimes phrased as a question, sometimes as a statement); some examples of x:

• white
• christian
• unaware of their own government's complicity in the 9/11 attacks

or more generally,

• of opinion y with regards to issue z

People would say things like this to me; it's a pretty natural topic of conversation when you travel.  People are curious about where you're coming from.  But I never knew quite how to respond.  Sometimes I tried to explain the diversity of American culture, which usually received polite nods, but I usually felt that whoever I was talking to wasn't really satisfied with that answer.  I was having these conversations either with Europeans living in smaller, more homogeneous states with longer national histories and more entrenched social customs, or Africans who identified more with a specific regional or ethnic group than their country of residence.  They wanted a simple answer to a question about what "Americans are like", and I wasn't prepared to give one.

In my mind, there is no easy answer to most of these questions because ultimately there aren't any secondary characteristics of American Identity.  We're the third most populous country in the world.  We encompass an incredible amount of geographic, political, religious, ethnic and cultural variety.  In global terms, we're a young nation populated by people from different places more or less since our inception as a state.  America is too big to be any one particular thing, which opens up the possibility for anyone to be American.

 I saw Diula and Lobé living in Mossi country in Burkina and North Africans living in their own ghetto in Paris, disparate groups living in little demographic islands and separated from the larger community by tall psycho-social walls.  It would be naïve to believe that the same sorts of barriers don't exist here, and perhaps this is just my hippy-dippy idealism at work, but I think those gaps aren't insurmountable.

***Big Asterisk: All this commentary inevitably originates from my particular social position, which as a white, protestant, heterosexual male places me safely in the majority in the U.S.  I'd really love to hear some thoughts and opinions from people that fall outside of that category here, particularly if they've traveled much outside the States and can provide a bit of a comparison of their experiences here vs. elsewhere.