The idea and implications of multiculturalism have been much debated in recent years and have become bound with other issues and concerns related to ethnicity, race, and concerns about equal treatment. The issues will be considered here, and interviews with a black and a white respondent will serve to focus the discussion and serve as a means of comparing different cultural experiences in American society as a whole.
Multicultural is term that refers to the structure of American society. At one time American society was described as a melting pot, implying that a people from many different cultures came together and were assimilated into the prevailing culture. More recently, though, we have seen that the source cultures survive in various ways, making American society into something more like a mosaic, with different cultures existing side-by-side in some form. Diane Ravitch indicates this when she writes:
As a result of the political and social changes of recent decades, cultural pluralism is now generally recognized as an organizing principle of this society. In contrast to the idea of the melting pot, which promised to erase ethnic and group differences, children now learn that. . . America has provided a haven for many different groups and has allowed them to maintain their cultural heritage or to assimilate, or--as is often the case--to do both; the choice is theirs, not the state's (Ravitch 542).
While our recognition of the multicultural nature of American society may be of recent origin, the society has been divided into different racial and ethnic groups for some time, though "divided" is too strong a word. Anthony Lukas in his book Common Ground shows how different backgrounds gave people a certain cultural identity that was different from their neighbors while not truly separating them from their neighbors. Lukas is writing about the 1960s, a particularly divisive time in American history because of the war...