Re: when the US was in the state of multiculturalism roughly 50 or more years ago, what that meant was that each group had its own culture, its own icons and its own facilities, and no one ever crossed the line between cultures. Now if Europe thinks that's the ideal, then they are very much in sync with an older America........
Again, your notion of multiculturalism is tainted by the racial factor... The European multicultural (white) monolith is not a replica of lily-white "Eisenhower America". The difference is that, in 1950s America, the white middle-class itself was, broadly speaking, monolithic. Aside from a few arch-liberal enclaves (NYC, LA, SF,...), all middle-class whites were religious, anti-Communist/deeply conservative, and supportive of a racially segregated environment. Moreover, most of their cultural diet was --and still is-- exclusively (North-)American. Compare that to Europeans who, most of the time, keep listening to singers and lyrics they don't understand! Turn on any FM radio in any European city and you'll get a continuous flow of American, Italian, French, Spanish, and even Arabic, songs.... One out of two movies Europeans go to watch in a theater is subtitled --the original soundtrack being English, Japanese, Spanish, German, or French.... Then there's Europe's deep, unyielding, political polarization. For a sizable part of Europe's working class and leftist intellectuals, "class warfare" and "boss vs labor" are still meaningful, not fanciful remnants of a bygone industrial age. Over here, politics has not yet degenerated into a US-like two-party circus... Schroeder vs Merkel, Chirac vs Le Pen, Prodi vs Berlusconi, Aznar vs Zapatero, are no mere variations of Tweedledee vs Tweedledum!
From the late 19th century until WW II, this country was a nation of immigrants. During that period, neighborhoods in large cities went through several groups of immigrants........hence the names........Little Italy, Chinatown, the Swedish ghetto, Japantown, Greektown, Koreantown, Germantown.....the list goes on and on. In those 'towns' that were actually neighborhoods, all the customs from the old country were firmly intact.....foods, language, even dress. Even to this day, many of those neighborhoods contain 3rd and 4th generation descendants of the original immigrants. To get your best Italian dinner in Boston or SF, one goes to the Little Italy neighborhoods in those cities. For the best German food you go to a neighborhood of Columbus......the list is long and varied.
However, in the old days, those neighborhoods served as informal prisons. If you were Italian, you were supposed to live in Little Italy and stay away from 'the Americans' who had emigrated for them. There weren't necessarily laws that spoke to the issue.......but rather it was understood.....just like its understood in current day Berlin that the Turks should stay in that one arrondissement I discussed earlier this week.
America's racial problems were a separate issue. They looked related but they really weren't. A Jew or a Swede or an Italian could eventually leave their ghetto if they were financially able. Blacks and similar people of color could not.........at least not without a lot of anguish and hassle.
So frankly, I don't see where Europe is ahead of the US in terms of multiculturalism........in fact, I find it rather peculiar all the animosity that developed in Yugoslavia after Tito died and that Belgium still is so geographically divided between the Flemish and the Walloons.....as just one of many examples.
As for the issue of race, I still believe that Europe is behind the US in tackling this issue.
ted |
