Separate but equal
Folks today want to avoid‘melting pot’
By Mark Baldridge
Diversions Editor
We live in an era in which the ideal of the
“melting pot,” so precious to our parents,
has been largely debunked — repudiated.
If any ideal fits the present spirit it’s the
“Separate but Equal” motto of the old Jim
Crow laws.
Of course those laws were meant to
enforce a system favorable to whites. Today
thesentiment is expressed by minority groups
who don’t want to be absorbed, homog
enized or melted in a pot. It’s not law and
(again, of course) no one is forced.
It’s not hard to see why someone might
want to avoid giving up his or her language,
culture and value systems for a piece of the
rapidly devaluing American pie. But what
are the contributing factors that make this
rejection possible?
We live on a shrinking planet. Communi
cations, technologies and, increasingly, eco
nomic necessities bring nations previously
far apart within easy access. The phone, the
fax, the conference call all make this world
more like Marshall McLuhan’s “Global Vil
lage” every day.
Many thinkers imagined that such new
technologies would make people more alike,
not emphasize their differences. It seems the
opposite is true, at least for the moment.
An unforeseen effect of easy communica
tion is that groups of a similar ethnic back
ground can keep in touch with each other
and their parent countries. Before there
were telephones, only letters could reach
places too far to travel. And the mails were
even slower in those days than now;
Keeping in touch means more chance to
practice one’s native tongue, more ability to
participate in the fads and customs of one’s
native land.
Another factor is travel, which has be
come more necessary — as economies
around the world struggle to keep up with
the changes — and much easier.
Increased travel means larger ethnic
groups can form outside the major cities.
Whole communities within communities can
form; their populations remaining fluid
enough that they don’t become stagnant
backwater versions of their own culture.
It’s here that we discover the tendency of
repulsion that probably accounts, in great
part, for the effect of increasing cultural
diversity we’re witnessing now.
It seems that as two cultures grow closer
to the moment when they will be indistin
guishable, there develops in both the active
wish to remain whole and separate.
It’s as if the culture itself could suffer a
loss of ego, an ego death, that frightens it
into reaction.
Thus the outbreaks of culture-centrism
we witness on our campuses and in our
cities. Thus the darker acts of intolerance
and prejudice that seem to be on the rise in
every sector.
No one wants to succumb, to be over
come by the pressures that would homog
enize us.
So what will happen? Are we eventually
to be, will we-nill we, one big happy family,
bland from pole to pole?
That depends.
New technologies also make possible the
proliferation of options. One is no longer
bound by necessity in quite the same way.
An example is the renewed effort by
powerful factions in Quebec to secede from
larger Canada.
They may succeed today when all previ
ous efforts have failed. Why? Because eco
nomic and trade agreements, made possible
by instantaneous, reliable communication,
would make any such succession almost
moot. Canada would continue, with some
initial quirks, to operate as an economic
block.
The point is that whether we succeed in
keeping our cultu ral heritage intact is largely
a function of whether the forces that pull us
together are greater than the forces that can
keep us apart.
What we’re striving toward, the balance
that we’re trying to strike, is unparalleled in
history. We may very well be on the thresh
old of entirely new and plastic forms of
culture.
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' Julia Mikolajcik/DN
Anthony Briggs, a junior from South Carolina, converted to Islam
in October, 1989. He dresses as people do in Sudan as an expres
sion of his faith. He has taken the name Adham Jabir Bahir, which
means “Black Comforter Dazzling.” He said he converted for
“political as well as religious reasons.”
