Melting Pot Essay: Race And Ethnicity
RACE AND ETHNICITY
A. Cult of Ethnicity
The US escaped the divisiveness of a multiethnic society by a brilliant solution: the creation of a brand-new national identity. The point of America was not to preserve old cultures but to forge a new, American culture. This was the ideal that a century later Israel Zangwill crystallized in the title of his popular 1908 play The Melting Pot.
The new American identity was inescapably English in language, ideas and institutions. The pot did not melt everybody, not even all the white immigrants; deeply bred racism put black Americans, yellow Americans, red Americans and brown Americans well outside the pale.
In the 20th century, new immigration laws altered the composition of the American people, …show more content…
Recruited by Xerox Corp. in 1977 under a pioneering plan to hire women and minorities, Williams rose to division vice president in just 13 years. While Williams attributes her success to hard work and business savvy, she acknowledges that her race and her sex played a role in her rapid rise. Affirmative action, she says, „opened the door, but it’s not a free pass. If anything, you feel like you’re under a microscope and have to constantly prove yourself by overachieving and never missing the mark.” For Roy V. Smith, 40, a black 18-year veteran of the Chicago police force, affirmative action means frustration. Since 1973, court-ordered hiring quotas and the aggressive recruitment of minorities have expanded black representation on the 12,004-member force from 16% to 24%. Smith contends, however, that gender and race have not opened doors for him but shut them. He has been denied promotion to sergeant so that Hispanics and females who scored lower on exams could be given the higher-ranking positions set aside for those groups. He worries that even if he is promoted, the achievement may be so tainted by affirmative action that he will be perceived as a „quota sergeant”. Last year he joined a reverse-discrimination lawsuit against the city of Chicago by 313 police officers, mostly white. „I am not anti-affirmative action”, he says. „ I am just against the way it …show more content…
Theodore Olson, the solicitor general, argued that not even diversity can justify the use of quotas. But Mr |
|Bush’s legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who wants to court more minority voters, pushed in the other direction. |
|The result is a bit of a fudge. Mr Bush said that he strongly supports diversity of all kinds in higher education. But he insisted that |
|you can achieve diversity without resorting to quotas. California, Florida and Texas have all done this by guaranteeing admissions to |
|the top students from high schools across the state, including low-income neighborhoods. |
|The fudge reflects what the American public feels. Voters strongly approve of giving a helping hand to minorities, but they dislike |
|quotas. A California proposition that banned racial preferences passed by a margin of 55% to 45%. |
|That said, filing a brief in favor of a bunch of white students is risky for the White House. The Democrats pounced on Mr Bush’s |
|statement as a blow to civil rights. And Mr Bush is hardly a poster-boy for meritocracy. Would this self-confessed C-student really
A. Cult of Ethnicity
The US escaped the divisiveness of a multiethnic society by a brilliant solution: the creation of a brand-new national identity. The point of America was not to preserve old cultures but to forge a new, American culture. This was the ideal that a century later Israel Zangwill crystallized in the title of his popular 1908 play The Melting Pot.
The new American identity was inescapably English in language, ideas and institutions. The pot did not melt everybody, not even all the white immigrants; deeply bred racism put black Americans, yellow Americans, red Americans and brown Americans well outside the pale.
In the 20th century, new immigration laws altered the composition of the American people, …show more content…
Recruited by Xerox Corp. in 1977 under a pioneering plan to hire women and minorities, Williams rose to division vice president in just 13 years. While Williams attributes her success to hard work and business savvy, she acknowledges that her race and her sex played a role in her rapid rise. Affirmative action, she says, „opened the door, but it’s not a free pass. If anything, you feel like you’re under a microscope and have to constantly prove yourself by overachieving and never missing the mark.” For Roy V. Smith, 40, a black 18-year veteran of the Chicago police force, affirmative action means frustration. Since 1973, court-ordered hiring quotas and the aggressive recruitment of minorities have expanded black representation on the 12,004-member force from 16% to 24%. Smith contends, however, that gender and race have not opened doors for him but shut them. He has been denied promotion to sergeant so that Hispanics and females who scored lower on exams could be given the higher-ranking positions set aside for those groups. He worries that even if he is promoted, the achievement may be so tainted by affirmative action that he will be perceived as a „quota sergeant”. Last year he joined a reverse-discrimination lawsuit against the city of Chicago by 313 police officers, mostly white. „I am not anti-affirmative action”, he says. „ I am just against the way it …show more content…
Theodore Olson, the solicitor general, argued that not even diversity can justify the use of quotas. But Mr |
|Bush’s legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who wants to court more minority voters, pushed in the other direction. |
|The result is a bit of a fudge. Mr Bush said that he strongly supports diversity of all kinds in higher education. But he insisted that |
|you can achieve diversity without resorting to quotas. California, Florida and Texas have all done this by guaranteeing admissions to |
|the top students from high schools across the state, including low-income neighborhoods. |
|The fudge reflects what the American public feels. Voters strongly approve of giving a helping hand to minorities, but they dislike |
|quotas. A California proposition that banned racial preferences passed by a margin of 55% to 45%. |
|That said, filing a brief in favor of a bunch of white students is risky for the White House. The Democrats pounced on Mr Bush’s |
|statement as a blow to civil rights. And Mr Bush is hardly a poster-boy for meritocracy. Would this self-confessed C-student really