Sometimes what people say or do in such debates is more an indicator of the fundamental presupposition that informs their engagement with the topic. This issue has been debated for quite some time by many different scholars, politicians and personalities. For instance, after publishing "The Clash of Civilizations" Samuel Huntington published what looks like a sequel and that is: "Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity."
One interesting point he made in that book that is relevant to this posting is his vehement argument that it is wrong to say that the US is a nation of immigrants. Why? For him the key issue is the distinction between "Settlers" and "Immigrants." According to him, it was when settlers who had a different vision came, settled and developed the country that immigrants found it attractive and then decided to move into the country. The analytical utility of his approach or reasoning is to grant more privilege or priority to the settlers in shaping American culture, national identity, and "zeitgeist." Thus he was opposed to multiculturalism. He privileges WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture as the core culture of the US and insisted that no society historically has survived in the long run based on multiculturalism. He gave specific examples of such failure like the USSR, Lebanon and Yugoslavia.
He particularly attacked Latinos in the concluding chapters of the book insisting that if they want to pursue an American Dream, there is no such dream in Spanish but English. By the time you reach this part of the book, you scratch your head and feel like you need a cup of coffee to deal with the broader social implications of his line of reasoning. All this argument is built on the premise of the distinction between settler and immigrant. At the end it is not just the analysis that is of interest to me but also the way his deep presuppositions or what some call "primitive assumptions" about the US, WASP and Western civilization informed the specific way he framed the discussion and the conceptual categories that informed his premise and logic of reasoning. One way to critique the assumption he made about "settlers" is the arguments in J.M. Blaut's "The Colonizer's Model of the World" where an assumption that informed western occupations of other countries was the continents or countries were empty. In this case Native Americans are reduced to footnotes of history, as if they did not exist.
But the book written by well-known libertarian, Charles Murray titled "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 -2010" could be used as an excellent critique of Huntington's over concern about multiculturalism as the greatest threat to the cohesion of American society. .Murray, though a libertarian with terrible reputation in many quarters because of the racist implication of one earlier book he co-wrote titled "The Bell Curve " amazingly expresses concern about how the widening inequality in the US is the number one threat to the cohesion of the country. He chose to write only on whites in America which is good because if there is such a social pathology among "even" whites and it is a threat to the cohesion of the US society, then Huntington's fear of multiculturalism is diminished or a misplaced priority. Murray argues in "Coming Apart" that in the future even intelligence will be skewed in its distribution in the US because there is an aristocracy of elitism through education where the smartest Americans end up in Ivy League schools and marry each other. Such families for him have higher odds of producing successful kids. He notes that the zip codes that the rich and poor live in are different, their average waist size indicating obesity varies etc. etc. Murray's book, in spite of him being written by a libertarian, a tradition that is more tolerant of inequality and in the far right, provides anyone on the Left with good documentation on how widening inequality is a major threat to the cohesion of US society, and not immigration or immigrants as such.
Samuel
Samuel Zalanga, Ph.D.Bethel UniversityDepartment of Anthropology, Sociology and Reconciliation Studies,Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, #24, Saint Paul, MN 55112.Office Phone: 651-638-6023On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 8:11 AM, Femi Segun <soloruntoba@gmail.com> wrote:Removing it does not remove the fact that the the US is a nation of immigrants. As former President Obama said during his last speech at a NATO meeting in Poland, July 2016, with the exception of the Native Americans, almost everybody in the country is an Immigrant. This includes those who hold the lever of power today.Sam--On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 7:17 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:--
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