Why do people say America is a "melting pot"?

Question

AMERICA IS NOT A MELTING POT!!!
It is a salad bowl because here in America where TOLERATED individual ethnic groups blend together, yet maintain their cultural uniqueness. Multiculturalism or Cultural Pluralism TOLERATES other sub cultures but usually has a DOMINATE mainstream culture. A example of a melting pot or FUSION CULTURE would be latin America where the WHITE dominican eats rice and beans and the BLACK dominican eats rice and beans and dance to bachata, salsa , or merenge REGARDLESS of origin.

Answer 1

More balsamico then please.
You're quite unseasoned too btw.
But alas, forgiven. "Yahoo Answers"
misleads many people to assuming
they are entitled to provide their own.

Answer 2

It's someting people used to say, but it fell out of favor when multi-culturalism became fashionable. The 'melting pot' model described well the way immigrants have, in the past, assimilated into American culture, while, at the same time America changed to integrate and accept aspects of those same immigrants' cultures. It was a process of continuous change, that produced a vibrant, if imperfect, society.

While that's still going on, the dominant multi-culturalist paradigm insists that it must be stopped, and has succeeded, to some extent, in doing so.

Today, denegrating American culture is seen as positive (it shows you're overcoming the evil of cultural-centrism), while praising any other culture is not only acceptable, but a duty of all right-thinking people.

Multi-culturalism has only been around for a few decades, and has proven destructive to those societies that adopt it. The philosophy /will/ disapear, relegated to a mere footnote in history. Whether 'western' cultures, like America, Canada, and those of Western Europe disapear with it, or reject it and survive, remains to be seen.

Answer 3

Well there are many ways one could interpret Melting Pot. It all depends how you see it. But it usually begins with people with few or more different cultural backgrounds living together in one society or country. How far you will extend the meaning is up to you. But it is not only in America. Nearly all countries in the world are melting pots.

Answer 4

I beg to differ. America is a melting pot. It is the fusion of many different cultures. For the most part we started out as disperate ethnic groups and have come together to form the American exo-culture we have today.

Answer 5

Number one in the Bible Belt. What else is new. Can it teach them to get an education and not be married with 3 kids before they turn 16?

Answer 6

Among other reasons, I would answer that it is because Jazz music could not have been created in any part of the world except America. Jazz music is a melding of African rhythms with European harmonies.

Answer 7

it was a melting pot at one time. Liberal multiculturalism has ruined that concept completely.

Answer 8

By your logic, The Native Americans tolerate us.

Answer 9

Sure is burning pot.

Answer 10

It's a hunka hunka burnin love.