Lady Liberty: Renewing the Promise of the Melting Pot

By HanaLyn Colvin – July 4, 2021

Fourth of July weekend had me reminiscing about the trip my man and I took in February to the Statue of Liberty. It was the first time that either one of us had been to Liberty Island. I stood at the feet of Lady Liberty beside a man who had immigrated to this country with his parents the way that my great-great-grandparents had immigrated before me. A man who pledged his oath to this nation and is every bit as American as I am, though our ancestors may have come from different continents and our skin color may be different hues.

That is the magic of this country. That we can take individuals from disparate cultures, races, and continents, and through the alchemy of our founding principles, we become one unified people with a shared national history and traditions.

It has become fashionably progressive to eschew the melting pot analogy in favor of the salad metaphor. The idea of the melting pot, it is alleged, is rooted in white supremacist expectations of assimilation to the dominant culture. American society should be like a diverse salad with various racial and ethnic groups sharing the same plate but maintaining their own distinct individualness.

That is the magic of this country. That we can take individuals from disparate cultures, races, and continents, and through the alchemy of our founding principles, we become one unified people with a shared national history and traditions.

But this is untenable for any country that wants to grow as a cohesive, united society. How easily can any one ill-favored ingredient be plucked off the plate and discarded. You don’t like onions, or croutons, or tomatoes? Pick them off the plate and throw them away. They haven’t integrated into the dish, they merely sit atop an admixture of unrelated ingredients. The salad tolerates different components but never fully incorporates them into a unified entity.

In the melting pot, every individual flavor retains something of its original characteristics but marries with other flavors to create an entirely new palate. Something that is uniquely its own: a truly American stew. Each ingredient contributes something different and once it is assimilated, it fundamentally changes the flavor and composition of the dish.

To become American is to intermarry our various ethnic and cultural origins into one uniquely American identity. This is the birthright of every new citizen, the inheritance of every immigrant. That we all participate in the heritage and promises of this great country. It is what our esteemed statesmen like Frederick Douglass fought for so passionately, to be fully incorporated into the foundational recipe of the nation, not to be relegated to a side dish or a topping that can be added and removed at a whim.

To become American is to intermarry our various ethnic and cultural origins into one uniquely American identity. This is the birthright of every new citizen, the inheritance of every immigrant. That we all participate in the heritage and promises of this great country.

Let us not sully that legacy by foolishly trying to separate the ingredients in the stew pot. The sweetness of the tomato cannot be removed once added, nor the spice of the habanero, nor the bite of the garlic once they have all lent their distinctive flavor to the pot. And why would we want to remove them? The stew pot provides the structure for all these diverse seasonings to blend, just as our founding documents provide the framework of individual rights and due process for this eclectic mix of cultures and traditions to flourish as one.

The Statue of Liberty draws more immigrants to our shores than immigrate to any other nation because people around the world desire to partake in the American experiment of individual rights and responsibilities — the twin pillars of Liberty – which have given birth to the greatest economic prosperity, upward mobility, and interracial tolerance in history. This is a land where ethnic minorities from fairly recent immigrant groups comprise the highest income earning and most well-educated demographics in the country.

Immigrants continually renew our pride in this country. It is they who have made the conscious and determined choice to join the American feast, to add their talents and characteristics to the recipe that is so uniquely ours. And in doing so, to claim by rights access to the same heritage and freedoms that we celebrated this weekend.

God bless America.