America - Melting Pot, or Watered-Down Stew?

At Richard's firm, AREVA, where I recently had a temporary job, the colleague I worked with had some interesting thoughts on the US culture as he experienced it over several visits. He said he found that the US had no distinctive culture. Everywhere one goes in Germany, he said, the culture is identifiably German. But in the US, there is a lack of a identifiable unique culture. The ethnic groups are, he said, only half-ethnic; that is, as I interpret his remark, their culture is in great part watered down by the dominating American uniformity. Taking his remarks as typically frank German observations, which are not meant as insults, I in part agreed with him. I said that I have a feeling that many Americans are seeking their ethnic roots (me included). They want to have an identifiable, unique culture that ties them to their ancestors. They want to know what their ancestors ate, how they played and cooked, and what they did in their spare time, where they came from and what they looked like. What was the culture that they left behind when they emigrated from Europe or Asia, or were forced from Africa?

I countered his observations by saying that the many ethnic groups have enriched our society. My examples came from the entertainment world. I pointed to Billy Crystal and Ben Stiller's father Jerry Stiller, who are inheritors of the Borscht Belt comedy tradition, from the resorts in the Catskills. The Black Entertainment Television Network, the TV shows featuring Hispanics , like the George Lopez show, and the series on PBS with James Edward Olmos about the Latino family, all present the differences between groups that enrich our culture. He then asked if I thought that the ethnic groups were growing apart as they were able to reinforce their identities in this way. My response was, far from it! The hip-hop and rap music of predominantly black artists is overwhelmingly popular with white teenagers in the affluent suburbs.

He mentioned that he had encountered the concern that the Spanish speakers would overwhelm the English-speaking culture as more immigration from Hispanic countries came in. Projections might show that people with Spanish as a mother tongue might eventually be in the majority, but it seems that the only people who speak Spanish and no English at all are the uneducated poor. The Irish immigrants, also poor and uneducated, came over by the hundreds of thousands in the mid-1800's and were feared for their catholicism/"Popery." Signs went up in the windows of businesses, "No Irish need apply." Now we have the Kennedys, and Ronald Reagan, as Richard's colleague pointed out, the Rockefellers, etc.