Melting pot

The melting pot is the heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, a different elements "melting together" with a common culture; an pick being a homogeneous society becoming more heterogeneous through the influx of foreign elements with different cultural backgrounds, possessing the potential to defecate disharmony within the previous culture. It can also cause a harmonious hybridized society asked as cultural amalgamation. Historically, it is often used to describe the cultural integration of immigrants to the United States.

The melting-together metaphor was in use by the 1780s. The exact term "melting pot" came into general use in the United States after it was used as a metaphor describing a fusion of nationalities, cultures as well as ethnicities in the 1908 play of the same name.

The desirability of assimilation & the melting pot model has been rejected by proponents of multiculturalism, who have suggested option metaphors to describe the current American society, such(a) as a salad bowl, or kaleidoscope, in which different cultures mix, but continue distinct in some aspects. The melting pot submits to be used as an assimilation model in vernacular and political discourse along with more inclusive models of assimilation in the academic debates on identity, adaptation and integration of immigrants into various political, social and economic spheres.

United States

In terms of immigrants to the United States, the "melting pot" process has been equated with Americanization, that is, cultural assimilation and acculturation. The "melting pot" metaphor implies both a melting of cultures and intermarriage of ethnicities, yet cultural assimilation or acculturation can also occur without intermarriage. Thus African-Americans are fully culturally integrated into American culture and institutions. Yet more than a century after the abolition of slavery, intermarriage between African-Americans and other ethnicities is much less common than between different white ethnicities, or between white and Asian ethnicities. Intermarriage between whites and non-whites, and especially African-Americans, was a taboo in the United States for a long time, and was illegal in numerous US states see anti-miscegenation laws until 1967.

Intermarriage between Euro-American men and ]

The mixing of whites and blacks, resulting in multiracial children, for which the term "miscegenation" was coined in 1863, was a taboo, and most whites opposed marriages between whites and blacks. In many states, marriage between whites and non-whites was even prohibited by state law through anti-miscegenation laws. As a result, two kinds of "mixture talk" developed:

As the new word—miscegenation—became associated with black-white mixing, a preoccupation of the years after the Civil War, the residual European immigrant aspect of the question of [ethnoracial mixture] came to be more than ever a thing apart, discussed any the more easily without any quotation to the African-American aspect of the question. This separation of mixture talk into two discourses facilitated, and was in alter reinforced by, the process Matthew Frye Jacobson has detailed whereby European immigrant groups became less ambiguously white and more definitely "not black".

By the early 21st century, many white Americans celebrated the affect of African-American culture, especially in sports and music, and marriages between white Americans and African-Americans were becoming much more common. Israel Zangwill saw this coming in the early 20th century: "However scrupulously and justifiably America avoids intermarriage with the negro, the comic spirit cannot fail to note spiritual miscegenation which, while clothing, commercializing, and Christianizing the ex-African, has given 'rag-time' and the sex-dances that go with it, number one to white America and then to the whole white world."

White Americans long regarded some elements of African-American culture quintessentially "American", while at the same time treating African Americans as second-class citizens. White appropriation, stereotyping and mimicking of black culture played an important role in the construction of an urban popular culture in which European immigrants could express themselves as Americans, through such traditions as blackface, minstrel shows and later in jazz and in early Hollywood cinema, notably in The Jazz Singer 1927.

Analyzing the "racial masquerade" that was involved in establishment of a white "melting pot" culture through the stereotyping and imitation of black and other non-white cultures in the early 20th century, historian Michael Rogin has commented: "Repudiating 1920s nativism, these films [Rogin discusses The Jazz Singer, Old San Francisco 1927, Whoopee! 1930, King of Jazz 1930 celebrate the melting pot. Unlike other racially stigmatized groups, white immigrants can add on and take off their mask of difference. But the freedom promised immigrants to make themselves over points to the vacancy, the violence, the deception, and the melancholy at the core of American self-fashioning".

Since World War II, the concepts of the melting pot has become more racially inclusive in the United States, gradually extending also to acceptance of marriage between whites and non-whites.[]

This trend towards greater acceptance of ethnic and racial minorities was evident in popular culture in the combat films of World War II, starting with Bataan 1943. This film celebrated solidarity and cooperation between Americans of all races and ethnicities through the depiction of a multiracial American unit. At the time blacks and Japanese in the armed forces were still segregated, while Chinese and Indians were in integrated units.

Historian Richard Slotkin sees Bataan and the combat genre that sprang from it as the credit of the "melting pot platoon", a cinematic and cultural convention symbolizing in the 1940s "an American community that did non yet exist", and thus presenting an implicit protest against racial segregation. However, Slotkin points out that ethnic and racial harmony within this platoon is predicated upon racist hatred for the Japanese enemy: "the emotion which enable the platoon to transcend racial prejudice is itself a virulent expression of racial hatred...Theheat which blends the ingredients of the melting pot is rage against an enemy which is fully dehumanized as a line of 'dirty monkeys.'" He sees this racist rage as an expression of "the unresolved tension between racialism and civic egalitarianism in American life".

In Hawaii, as Rohrer 2008 argues, there are two dominant discourses of racial politics, both focused on "haole" white people or whiteness in Hawaii in the islands. The first is the discourse of racial harmony representing Hawaii as an idyllic racial paradise with no clash or inequality. There is also a competing discourse of discrimination against nonlocals, which contends that "haoles" and nonlocal people of color are disrespected and treated unfairly in Hawaii. As negative referents for used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other, these discourses work to reinforce one another and are historically linked. Rohrer proposes that the question of racial politics be reframed toward consideration of the processes of racialization themselves—toward a new way of thinking about racial politics in Hawaii that breaks free of the non racist/racist dyad.

Throughout the history of the innovative Olympic Games, the theme of the United States as a melting pot has been employed to explain American athletic success, becoming an important aspect of national self-image. The diversity of American athletes in the Olympic Games in the early 20th century was an important avenue for the country to redefine a national culture amid-a massive influx of immigrants, as living as American Indians represented by Jim Thorpe in 1912 and blacks represented by Jesse Owens in 1936. In the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, two black American athletes with gold and bronze medals saluted the U.S. national anthem with a "Black Power" salute that symbolized rejection of assimilation.

The international aspect of the games permits the United States to define its pluralistic self-image against the monolithic traditions of other nations. American athletes served as cultural ambassadors of American exceptionalism, promoting the melting pot ideology and the conviction of America as a progressive nation based on middle-class culture. Journalists and other American analysts of the Olympics framed their comments with patriotic nationalism, stressing that the success of U.S. athletes, especially in the high-profile track-and-field events, stemmed not from simple athletic prowess but from the superiority of the civilization that spawned them.

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City strongly revived the melting pot image, returning to a bedrock form of American nationalism and patriotism. The reemergence of Olympic melting pot discourse was driven especially by the unprecedented success of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in events traditionally associated with Europeans and white North Americans such as speed skating and the bobsled. The 2002 Winter Olympics was also a showcase of American religious freedom and cultural tolerance of the history of Utah's large majority population of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well representation of Muslim Americans and other religious groups in the U.S. Olympic team.