What's So Great About America (13 page)

The experiment that the founders embarked upon two centuries ago has largely succeeded in achieving its goals. We see the evidence in New York, which presents an amazing sight to the world. Tribal and religious battles, such as we see in Lebanon, Mogadishu, Kashmir, and Belfast, don't happen here. In New York restaurants, white and African-American secretaries have lunch together. In Silicon Alley, Americans of Jewish and Palestinian descent collaborate on e-commerce solutions and play racquetball after work. Hindus and Muslims, Serbs and Croats, Turks and Armenians, Irish Catholics and British Protestants, all seem to have forgotten their ancestral differences and joined the vast and varied parade of New Yorkers. Everybody wants to “make
it,” to “get ahead,” to “hit it big.” And even as they compete, people recognize that somehow they are all in this together, in pursuit of some great, elusive American dream. In this respect New York is a resplendent symbol of America.

My conclusion is that the American founders solved two great problems—the problem of scarcity, and the problem of diversity—that were a source of perennial misery and conflict in ancient societies, and that remain unsolved in the regimes of contemporary Islam. The founders invented a new regime in which citizens would enjoy a wide berth of freedom—economic freedom, political freedom, and freedom of speech and religion—in order to shape their own lives and pursue happiness. By separating religion from government, and by directing the energies of the citizens toward trade and commerce, the American founders created a rich, dynamic, and tolerant society that is now the hope of countless immigrants and a magnet for the world.

D
espite the fantastic scope and opportunity that America provides, many immigrants experience occasional ambivalence and anguish about their adopted country. My colleague Shelby Steele terms this “the shock of freedom.” I see it more as the anxiety of displacement. In any event, immigrants commonly report feelings of uncertainty, loss, loneliness—a sense of being adrift in unfamiliar waters. To some extent these are the natural sentiments of one who is trying to find his way in a new society. What is new is that immigrants today encounter a multicultural ideology that encourages them to cling to their native ways, to resist assimilation, to “affirm their differences.”

From the multicultural perspective, asking the immigrant to “become an American” is forcing him to give up who he is. In this view, assimilation is an expression of bigotry, because the nonwhite immigrant is required to put on a white cultural straitjacket.
¹⁹
Multiculturalists say that white Americans should be the ones who adapt: they should learn to respect and cherish cultural differences. The multiculturalists regard the “melting pot” as a racist concept. In their view, immigrants should maintain their native identity and their traditional customs. The multiculturalists want immigrants to be in America but not of America.

But this does not seem to be what most immigrants want. The reason is simple: if the immigrant wanted to preserve intact his native culture, if he wanted to be the same person that he was in his home country, then why come to the United States? Clearly the immigrant seeks something that is available here and not in his homeland. That something, I have suggested, is the opportunity to have a good life, but more important, the chance to make his own life.

Most immigrants realize that this requires adapting to the cultural strategies of success in the United States. There is nothing bigoted or racist about this. It does not mean that, in order for me to become American, I have to quit playing the sitar and stop eating curry. I can preserve elements of my native culture and still wholeheartedly participate in the American way of life. This was not always the case with earlier generations of immigrants, who were pressured to abandon their old lives and become completely new people. A century ago, one social worker in New York noted of a family that had recently arrived from Sicily, “Not yet Americanized. Still eating Italian food.”
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The nativist prejudice was that “Italian-Americans” were somehow incomplete Americans.
As Teddy Roosevelt put it with characteristic pugnacity, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.”
²¹

But this is too harsh, and makes unnecessary and unreasonable demands on immigrants. A much better idea is the “melting pot,” which emerged in
resistance
to the nativist doctrine. The melting pot concept is that immigrants bring something new and valuable to America, just as America has much that is new and valuable to offer them. So immigrants change America, and America changes the immigrants. Pizza and hamburgers, once alien imports from Italy and Germany, have become quintessentially American foods. Chinese food is now well established, and Indian and Thai dishes are also quite popular. While Americans benefit from this variety of cuisine, immigrants, too, realize that they have choices. In India I ate curry and rice every day; now I have the option of eating southern fried chicken or enchiladas. Why, then, should I hold onto my native culture and limit myself to the options my ancestors had?

I am using the example of cuisine to make the broader point that ethnicity in the Old World is involuntary, but in America it is, to a large degree, chosen. Think about it this way: Mario Cuomo's grandfather had no choice but to be Italian. That was an identity that was imposed on him. It defined who he was, what he ate, what he believed. But with the grandson it is a different story. No one is more Italian than Mario Cuomo—on Columbus Day. When he speaks before the Anti-Defamation League, however, he sings a different melody. I am quite sure Mario Cuomo likes pasta, but I doubt that it encompasses the whole of his cuisine. He has chosen what he wants to retain from the Old World and what he wants to relinquish. As an American, his Italian heritage is only one part of Mario Cuomo's identity.

I have been speaking of ethnicity largely in the cosmetic, superficial sense. At this surface level, it is possible for immigrants to live in several cultures. One doesn't have to choose between eating curry and eating southern fried chicken; one can do both. I can watch a Hindi film this week and Harrison Ford's latest thriller the next week. But at the deeper level, this is not possible. Cultures are fundamentally rooted in the
cult,
and they embody worldviews that are sometimes incompatible and irreconcilable. Either I consult my parents about whom to marry, or I decide for myself. Either I remain a Buddhist, or I become a Catholic, or give up my religion altogether. The point is that I cannot do all these things simultaneously; I have to choose.

Here is another example. In most Asian countries, the basic premise is that older people are wiser. Age is believed to confer the wisdom that derives from experience. This was the basis of ancestor worship in China; it helps to explain why, even today, the Chinese tend to be ruled by octogenarians. In America, however, the whole culture seems oriented around the preferences of fourteen-year-olds. Youth, not old age, sets the tone. There are reasons for these cultural differences, of course. Technology confers a decisive advantage on the young: they may not know about the Depression or World War II, but they do know how to program their VCRs and record messages on their answering machines. In a fast-changing, technological society, the young are “with it” and the old are constantly in danger of being “out of it.”

My purpose here is not to say which way is better, but to say that it is an illusion to believe that one can inhabit multiple cultures in a deep sense. Immigrants know that there are hard choices to be made, and these have benefits as well as costs. The immigrant who falls in love and wants to marry outside his ethnic and
religious group knows that, in doing so, he might be risking his relationship with his family. The newcomer who wants to become an American is embarking on a journey that is likely to cut him off from his native country, so that he becomes a stranger to people he has grown up with. Some immigrants never manage this transition between cultures, occupying a tragic middle position in which they are at home neither in America nor in their homeland.

Even so, on some issues there are immense practical advantages to adopting the American way. The best example of this is speaking English. I have heard bilingual activists deny that speaking English is a prerequisite to enjoying the American dream. One Latino activist informed me that Cubans can get along very well in Miami without speaking a word of English: you can work for a Cuban company, shop at Cuban stores, make a deposit at a Cuban bank, read Spanish-language newspapers, and so on. But even in this exceptional case, you can flourish only if you stay in Miami. By and large, immigrants reject the harmful doctrines of the bilingual activists. The vast majority of immigrants understand perfectly well that they cannot enjoy a full life in the United States unless they can speak English.

Many conservatives have expressed concerns about the balkanization of America. The multicultural dream is their nightmare. Even though I agree that balkanization is undesirable, I do not share the conservatives' pessimism. I know that America is not, and never will be, Bosnia. I recognize the power of the American idea and the strength of the solvent of Americanization. Consider a typical Indian woman at JFK Airport. To look at her—the sari, the beads, the dot on her forehead, and so on—she seems utterly out of place in a modern, Western civilization. But then
look at her four-year-old son. The little fellow is running around, he is making a big noise, he is biting people—in short, he has been thoroughly Americanized. However fiercely the first-generation immigrant holds onto the native culture, I do not believe that he can prevent his children from being assimilated.

In general, I believe that this is a good thing, but it is not an unmixed blessing. There are some respects in which I do not want my daughter to be completely Americanized. I have noticed that when second-generation Asian-Americans become fully assimilated, they don't study as hard and their test scores fall. I am quite willing to let my daughter date and choose the person she wants to marry, as long as the process begins at the age of thirty. I am currently doing Internet research into convent schools. “Good luck,” my American friends say sarcastically, and of course they are right. What are the chances that my effort to thwart full assimilation will succeed? Not very good. But I still intend to try. So wish me luck: I will need it.

What African-Americans Owe America

I
T SEEMS CLEAR THAT AMERICA WORKS PRETTY WELL FOR immigrants, but does it also work well for domestic minority groups, such as African-Americans? This was a topic on which I debated the Reverend Jesse Jackson a few years ago at Stanford University. Jackson began by asserting that America is and always has been a racist society. To demonstrate this, Jackson evoked the painful history of slavery and segregation. He also cited a contemporary list of horrors—the Rodney King beating, the role of Mark Fuhrman in the O. J. Simpson case, racist comments at Texaco, the blacks who couldn't get served at Denny's, and several other examples of continuing racism against black Americans.

I did not deny that racism exists, and conceded that in a big country like the United States one could find many examples of it. But I asked Jackson to prove to me that racism today was
potent enough and widespread enough that it could prevent me, or him, or my daughter, or his children, from achieving their basic aspirations? Where is that kind of racism, I said—show it to me. Jackson hemmed and hawed, wrinkled his forehead, played with his mustache. He was thinking deeply.

Finally he admitted that he could provide no such evidence. But its absence, he went on to argue, in no way demonstrated that racism had abated. No, America was in his view just as racist as in the past. The only difference is that racism has gone underground; it has become institutionalized, so that in an invisible but no less insidious way, it continues to thwart blacks and other minorities from achieving the American dream. “Racism used to be overt,” Jackson said. “Now it is covert.” He went into a rhyme sequence. “I may be well dressed, but I'm still oppressed.” And so on.