have come to inhabit. Racial tensions and ethnic conflicts, when left unaddressed, tend only to increase in their potential for violence (Pearson, 1995, p. 44). And while it is certainly true that this has sometimes occurred, it is more often true in American history that each conflict has been addressed at least in part as it has arisen and Americans have continually changed their conceptions of who belongs, what it means to belong, and how social institutions must be constructed to allow for a constantly changing face of the nation (Tajfel, 1982: p. 7).
For much of American history, scholars, elected officials and ordinary citizens have alternately sided with models of assimilation, in which all people who come to the United States truly do become melted together, with each one of us becoming like our neighbors in terms of language, dress, religious beliefs and political practices. This process of homogenization is what has usually been meant by the idea of the Melting Pot, and it was most prominent and most useful during those decades in which the majority of immigrants to this country were already relatively similar to each other. Thus, in the first waves of immigration in the 17th and early 18th centuries when most people who came here were northern Europeans, it was relatively easy for them to find at least some common ground. This was again true during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when northern and eastern European peoples came to the United States (Logan and Schneider, 1984, pp. 875-6).
Such an assimilationist model has worked less well when immigrants to this country were farther from the social and cultural norm. Certainly, black African slaves cannot be said to have integrated themselves happily into the extant U.S. population
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