The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
There was no plan from the beginning that the United States of America should become the most multicultural nation-state in the history of the world, but that’s what happened anyway.
In the earliest millennia of human habitation in the Americas, there were various tribes of semi-indigenous peoples who migrated here across the land bridge which existed for a few thousand years between what came to be known as Siberia and Alaska. They were semi-indigenous, because before they came there were no humans at all living in the Americas. Over many centuries, these tribes became separate peoples, speaking separate languages and, to some extent, manifesting their own separate cultures.
Then, in the early seventeenth century, British settlers came to what later evolved into the USA. Most of them were English, but there also were some Scots, a few Welsh, and later, after the Irish potato famines of the mid-eighteenth century, a large wave of Irish. They were not British, but they had been unwillingly Anglicized by the English..
Germans came later in the seventeenth century, and after them (after some troubles in Northern Ireland, the Land of Relatively Recent Troubles), there was a sizeable inundation of people who were called Scotch-Irish. Because of unrest in Italy, many Italians came to Multiculturiana later in the nineteenth century, as did Poles, Hungarians, French, Russians, Czechs, Serbs, Scandinavians, and other Europeans. America was where European people went when there were problems in the places they went from.
However, one group of people did not come to America seeking fortune and/or fame. They were forcibly brought here from Africa. They were Black slaves. It was not easy visually and specifically to identify European settlers by the countries from which they came, but everyone could identify Blacks as Africans, even though they also came from many different tribes and ethnic groups in their own homelands.
In the twentieth century, refugees from wars and famines began to flood into America. We were a large nation with lots of land, and we could absorb lots of people from lots of places, and we did --- Jews and other Eastern Europeans before and after World War I; other Europeans, including Germans as DPs (displaced persons) after World War II; Iraqis, Egyptians, Syrians after wars between Arabs and Israelis in the mid-twentieth century; Koreans after the Korean War; Vietnamese, Laotians, and Hmong after the War in Viet Nam; more Iraqis and Afghans after the wars we waged in those countries.
Throughout the last century, Chinese, Japanese, and Indians came in trickles, then in rivulets, and then, because many of them came here to study and were encouraged to stay here, they stayed, until now there is a sizeable Asian minority living throughout America.
By far the most significant migration into Multiculturiana in recent decades has come from the South. Mexicans represent the largest contingent, but millions of others from Central and South America also have arrived, and most of them also because of troubles back home. Social and political upheaval is a far greater impetus for migration than the perception of better economic opportunities.
If the United States had remained only thirteen colonies-turned-states along the Eastern seaboard, we would still be essentially a bastion of Brits. As we evolved historically, though, we took possession of the entire southern half of North America. Therefore the Land of Opportunity became open to people from nearly two hundred nations throughout the world. The American Dream was launched, and it was naively assumed that the streets were paved with gold.
Only three other nations in the past five hundred years had a sufficient land mass to become the multicultural mecca that the United States became. They were Canada, Brazil, and Australia. The problem there was that Canada and Australia had a sufficient political environment to be major multicultural nation-states, but Canada was too cold and Australia was too dry and too isolated in the midst of a vast watery world. Brazil was certainly large enough, but politically and geographically it was too wild and chaotic. Besides, it had an enormous interior untamed jungle. So it was natural that the USA evolved into the Sole Superpower of World-wide Multiculturalism.
In some ways, we have been remarkably successful in pulling it off. In other ways, we are lightyears away from being what we need to become.
Here is the sad truth: We have absorbed everyone who came here voluntarily much better than we have allowed those who came here involuntarily to be absorbed. Blacks still have the hardest time being accepted. Black Lives Matter to all Blacks, but they don’t matter nearly enough to too many whites.
We have never done enough to make Blacks equal to the rest of us. There seems to be something insidious in human nature which is irrationally skeptical about black skin. That is true not only in America; it is true nearly everywhere --- except, surprisingly, Brazil. But maybe that isn’t so surprising, because races and ethnicities were genetically mixed there much more completely and openly from the beginning than anywhere else on earth.
We may not be a racist nation, however that might be described. Still, we have more racist citizens than most other nations, and that reality emerges directly from our multiculturalism. Racism is a fruitless effort to lock the barn door long after a huge stable of multicultural equines has been constructed.
The American Civil War was not initially fought to free the slaves. It took over two years before it became widely affirmed that that was its primary purpose. Reconstruction did not reconstruct America. If anything, it fractured America. Its failure was perhaps the biggest single threat to multiculturalism we have encountered. It resulted in a movement toward white supremacy which has slowly gained momentum ever since. The presidency of our previous president may have given white supremacy its biggest boost.
It is impossible for America to attempt at this late date to revert to the uniculturalism which the British intended from 1607 to 1776. One culture was never an option from the beginning anyway, with scores of Indian tribes and millions of Black slaves. Trying to thrust the genie back into the bottle via white supremacy became a hopeless enterprise.
Over a period of four centuries, many factors coalesced to make the United States of America the great, tortured, welcoming, suspicious, admirable, and execrable nation we have become. We and all of our forebears, with the exception of those whose ancestors came as slaves, came here because we wanted to come here.
Now we must do our best to make the World’s Melting Pot into a smoothly functioning multicultural ever-simmering stew. It shall never be fully accomplished, alas, but it must continuously be attempted. Otherwise we shall ultimately become a gigantic failed state. - May 1, 2021
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.