The Melting Pot Versus The Salad Bowl

I was in Canada last week for our SES Toronto show, and I had an interesting
talk with my cab driver on the way back to the airport about immigration and
integration of different cultures. His key misconception was over the idea that
America is all about the "melting pot," where all cultures are mixed together
into one.

I got the impression this might be a common one for Canadians. Indeed, I
started my keynote with a pretty funny commercial that used to air in Canada,
poking fun in part at American stereotypes of them. You can check it out
here (and some
background on it

here), but this is the key part that goes with my post:

I believe in…diversity, not assimilation,

Now I’m an American, not a Canadian. But you know what? I believe in
diversity as well. In fact, that’s what I was taught in school — ordinary
public school in Southern California.

In particular, we learned that the melting pot (yep, there’s even a Wikipedia
entry on the origins of
it) was an outdated metaphor for what Americans were supposed to be. In a
melting pot, everyone was mixed together to become one single thing, all
Americans — and perhaps without retaining your origins.

Heck, there was even the Schoolhouse Rock video I watched as a kid, where all
these various Americans of different origins jumped into a big pot to be mixed
together as Americans. I’ll come back to that in a moment, but onto the "salad
bowl."

We were taught that the salad bowl was the better metaphor for us to learn
about American and immigrants. In a salad bowl, different ingredients are all
mixed together to make one thing, yet each ingredient also retains its own
characteristics. They aren’t blended into some bland goo.

While these are two different concepts, I’d also argue that they are also
synonyms for many Americans. People I know, if they talk about a melting pot,
it’s understood that different cultures, races and ethnicities aren’t supposed
to be giving up their identities while also becoming part of a unified America.
In other words, people may often say melting pot but mean the salad bowl
concept.

You can even see this in that old Schoolhouse Rock video. When the people
jumped in, they didn’t get all blended into sameness. The song even ends:

Go on and ask your grandma,
Hear what she has to tell
How great to be American
And something else as well.

Not everyone believes that, of course. There are plenty of Americans who feel
immigrants should learn English, become "normal" Americans (whatever that’s
supposed to be) and so on. For them, the melting pot is that blending.

For me — melting pot/salad bowl — whatever you want to call it, it’s about
a country of immigrants becoming stronger by both embracing the diversity of its
cultures but also all feeling they do belong to one nation as well.