Mark Bowden: Melting pot is our nation’s destiny
Growing up in the 1950s, I first became aware of a more colorful world beyond the neat lawns of my Chicago suburb because of the civil rights movement.
I attended St. Petronille Elementary School and viewed my community through windows of stained glass. In that naive state, I believed the world contained only two kinds of people: Catholics, who subscribed to our “one true faith,” and “publics,” the less spiritually fortunate herded into public schools.
I had never met a Jew. I had never even heard of Islam, Hinduism or any of the world’s other faiths. Everyone I knew was Christian and white.
But I heard plenty about “Negroes.” Their struggle for equal rights reached me through television, the Chicago Tribune I delivered every morning, and the glossy pages of the Life magazine I eagerly awaited every week. As with many of my generation, the belief that the protesters were right – and in the bedrock American principle that all men are created equal – was the first strong conviction of my life.
I believed that despite the overt racism of my Alabama-born grandfather, who freely used the vulgar variant of the word “Negro,” which my parents forbade in our house. And I believed it despite the troubling recognition that equal rights would change the comfortable world I knew.
And it has – in some ways more than I imagined, in some ways less. But as I near the end of my sixth decade, I live in an America where my white, Anglo-Saxon slice of the demographic pie is steadily shrinking. Over the next 40 years, statistical projections show, those “other” Americans – the ones I grew up calling “minorities” – will together form more than half the population. In other words, I may live long enough to be a minority myself.
In his new book “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” Joel Kotkin notes that America has the highest fertility rate of any advanced country, primarily because of its nonwhite citizens. It remains the primary destination of the world’s migrants, and no matter how many walls and laws are put up, they will keep coming.
Unlike past waves of immigrants, today’s newcomers tend to be educated and skilled. Kotkin aptly describes the U.S. population as “a dazzling and complex composite,” and it’s becoming more so. He predicts Latino and Asian numbers to triple by 2050.
Old white guys like me don’t need the weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. For most Americans with my mileage, this multiethnic, multiracial course is more than a matter of dry statistics. Comedian Chris Rock has a memorable routine in which he warns, “In America, you have to be careful who you hate, ’cause they’ll end up in your family.” My immediate family is still mostly Anglo-Irish-German- Christian (which itself testifies to generations of intermingling), but it is also African-American, Russian, Danish, Jewish and Korean. There’s also a hardy strain of Italian cousins, and a Greek wedding is on the horizon.
This is nothing new. As anyone who has had his DNA analyzed will tell you, America is hybrid from way back. In 1742, before the nation even existed or was called a “melting pot,” a Moravian elder described his and my home turf this way: “Pennsylvania is a compleat Babel.” The famous 18th-century Lutheran missionary Heinrich Muhlenberg worried about the purity of his Lutheran faith in polyglot Philadelphia, noting with alarm that young people would “gradually degenerate … mixing with other nationalities.”
When the walls of nationality and religion started falling, there remained race. During the Civil War, slave owners spread fears of “miscegenation,” warning that freed blacks would intermarry with and pollute the purity of the white race, prompting Abraham Lincoln to famously counter that the most fervid racial mixing was taking place on their own plantations.
Feared, condemned and resisted every step of the way, and nearly always accompanied by violence and struggle, this cross-pollination is America. This column will likely provoke the usual sneers, but those who cling to myths of racial purity in this country are swimming against an unstoppable tide. A recent Gallup poll showed that 95 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 approve of interracial dating, compared with only 45 percent of those over 64.
As the stubborn walls of racial and ethnic identity erode, racism loses meaning. When skin color sends no more of a signal than eye or hair color (and only then), racism will be dead. Future, browner generations will wonder what all the fuss was about.
Ours was the first nation in the world founded on an idea, not on some notion of ethnic, racial or religious primacy. Universal equality, the first big idea I embraced as a child, remains the most revolutionary concept in human history. It was flatly stated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and it was enforced at terrible cost by Union armies in the Civil War. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. demanded that we live up to it in the last century, and it defines our struggle against Islamist theocrats today.
Some worry that becoming a “dazzling and complex composite” will destroy our heritage. It is fulfilling it.
It is why America remains the model in a world where borders are so easily crossed and where class barriers are falling victim to education and instant global communication. It is why America remains the antidote to all forms of tyranny. It is the nation we were destined to be.