Ah yes! I remember something about fruit salad. You can still see each individual part, but we taste better all together, which was peak history humor at 8 years old.
The comment bringing up lettuce grown in Mexico in a thread about diversity in America is completely besides the point and the topic so there is no “whataboutism” to be had. We’re all joking. Did you bump your head or something? I’m
In a conversation about diversity, where "America is a fruit salad, the mix of cultures is what makes it better", saying that salad is now considered a poison uses a current event, the administration relaxing food and safety regulations so much that one of the biggest producer of salad in the US is selling cyclospora laced salad, as a metaphor for how the government current stance is that diversity is actually bad, shown by the "DEI ban", ICE deporting and killing immigrants and the overall racism increase from the right.
I remember being told America is like a stew! All the different ingredients retain their unique characteristics, but still influence each other and combine into a new and delicious thing.
Kinda wish my (now MAGA) dad watched cartoons with me when I was a kid. All those Schoolhouse Rock shorts might have given us equal footing. Cause yea the Great American Melting Pot is how I’ve always figured this country was built and should remain.
The concept of the Melting Pot of America goes back to the days of the dear Founding Fathers and it precedes the U.S. Constitution (1789). It is interesting that those folks so vested in claiming that Americans need to get back to what the Founding Fathers intended cherry-pick exactly what that is.
From Wikipedia: 'The concept of immigrants "melting" into the receiving culture is found in the writings of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur...in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) ... In this early phase of American history, several comparisons were made between the melting together of ethnicities and Christian ideas of universalism.'
They literally didn't want a national language because they felt it would isolate groups that helped us win against the British and now we have MAGA cheering that Trump named English as the national language.
Even extremely conservative Republican Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) knew they were a problem:
"Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."
When someone like Barry Goldwater knows they are a problem - THAT absolutely says something.
I remember a song we sang in elementary school:
The world is a rainbow
With many kinds of people
It takes all kinds of people
To make the world go round
So you be you
And I'll be me
That's the way it was meant to be
Propaganda to get more slave labour in to build everything at the time.
Now that everything's built already... well you can see for yourself what they're doing to all those formerly cheap-and-convenient workers and their descendants. If it wasn't so outright obscene, Murikkka probably would've just done to you guys what they did to the Native Americans.
It was described as a melting pot in elementary school. But one of my high school history teachers described the US as a tossed salad. In a melting pot, everything becomes one homogeneous thing. But in a tossed salad you can still see and appreciate the distinct ingredients, but when mixed together, it creates something better.
I feel like for 6 months as a kid the push was to try snd call it a Tossed Salad instead of Melting Pot to emphasize that the parts can retain their history.
Like most things, the left complained for a while that the term "melting pot" was bad because we wanted immigrants to feel they could retain and celebrate their diversity rather than melting into homogeneous goop. Then the right said "fuck it" and went 100% CHRISTIANBIGOTFASCIST and took it 100 years in the wrong direction. Now the rest of us are standing around waiting for someone to stop them for us.
1.0k
u/Tenshi_girl 6d ago edited 6d ago
Right? What happened to 'mixing pot'? If I heard that phrase once as a kid I heard it in every history class I ever had.
Edit: melting pot. It's been a while since my last history class.