It is often difficult, for those of us living at the end of the 20th century, nearly two generations after the bright promise of the Civil Rights movement has lost so much of its luster, to believe that the United States has made a success of blending together the various races, ethnicities and other diversities that the many immigrant groups have brought to this country. It is far easier to see the United States as a country where the center cannot hold, as the site of bitter and unending culture wars.
And yet, while one truth about the United States is that the various groups that have come together to make it up are so often with varying degrees of acrimony and even violence trying to sort themselves back out into their separate identities, it is also true that historically American society has been extremely successful in assimilating diverse cultural experiences into a common American culture. As our country has matured, the American public has increasingly found itself bound together in fair equanimity by a commonly held sense of moral responsibility leavened with tolerance for the weaknesses and differences of others.
Ironically, one of the reasons that Americans have been able to create something like a national culture, blending together diverse populations into a rich stew, is that Americans have traditionally been fairly contentious about the issues of race and ethnicity. The history of the country is one of various nativist movements that have risen and proclaimed all who follow after should return to where they came, are not and can never be "real" Americans, do not belong here. Such claims and the counter-claims that have always followed have given people repeated chances to come to terms with what it means to be an American. If each new immigrant group had been allowed to join into the national culture more smoothly, the overall result might actually have been a society that was far more splintered than the one we ...