The Golden Rule

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 proclaim

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s, participating in the larger culture (in which assimilation does occur and we do become more liked each other) as well as in the culture of our particular ethnic, religious, gender, professional, etc. groups (Logan and Schneider, 1984, p. 888). These ideas about assimilation, multiculturalism and social harmony are perhaps more easily understood û as well as more persuasively argued û if one leaves off generalities and examines a specific historical circumstance. An ideal way to understand the complex mechanisms required to keep a multicultural society at peace with itself is to examine the way a particular cultural group is added to the existing social and cultural mix. Chinese immigrants are an ideal group to examine in this light because they have come to this country relatively recently and so their immigration is well documented, they are not untypical of a number of different immigrant groups, so findings about them have some more general applicability, and because of their physical racial characteristics and well as distinctive cultural practices, they stood out from the Americans who were already here. There was no easy way to make Chinese acculturate; they are one of the immigrant groups who could not conveniently and
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Approximate Word count = 2065
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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