The Importance Of The Melting Pot

Should members of cultural minorities be encouraged to maintain their cultural traditions, or to assimilate into American culture? According to sociologist Louis Wirth, “a minority is a group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment, and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination”. A portion of America thinks that cultural minorities should have to assimilate to American culture. However, other people think that we should encourage them to maintain their cultural traditions. Cultural minorities should be encouraged to maintain their cultural traditions in order to promote cultural …show more content…
Our country is influenced heavily on immigration and people migrating from their own countries to gain citizenship in America, and this is why America coined the name the Melting Pot. We are all just a piece of the American puzzle. The Melting Pot helps people feel welcome and wanted in a culture other than their own. Multiculturalism definitely played a part in early America. People who immigrated from other countries to America assimilated to the culture around them. That wasn’t because they were forced to do it, they did it because they were welcomed into America. In today’s society, we are practically forcing our immigrants to assimilate, which isn’t working at all. We should focus on being culturally diverse and encouraging people to be themselves. We are trying to force color blindness, which is having negative impacts. According to a study run at the University of Georgia, they “investigated the effects of Whites’ diversity beliefs on their minority co-workers’ psychological engagement, a meaningful target outcome. Given that multiculturalism predicts decreased bias, and thus contributes to a positive diversity climate, and color blindness predicts increased bias, and thus contributes to a negative diversity climate, we hypothesized that Whites’ multiculturalism is associated with higher minority engagement and that Whites’ color blindness is associated with lower minority engagement.” They found out that multiculturalism is essentially better than color blindness. Multiculturalism has a positive effect on the test subjects and color blindness has a negative effect. The conclusion being that multiculturalism can have a positive effect and make things better. Not just for cultural minorities, but also for everyone else. A decrease in bias and more positivity would be a good thing and a great thing for society. Multiculturalism and