When I arrived in the United States at the age of 4 I didn’t really speak English. I had learned a bit from my grandmother, who knew I was going to the United States at some point in the near future, but I was definitely not fluent when I entered kindergarten. I was given an IQ test on the first day of school and scored in the bottom 5 percent. I was given an IQ test on near the end of the school year, and scored in the top 5 percent. In first grade my teacher thought that I still exhibited some deficits in my English vocabulary (though not at all in my accent) so she sent home some books with my parents for me to read. Generally they were in the category of kitschy Americana, the city cousin going to visit her country cousin, and vice versa. By the time I had entered second grade any noticeable language deficits were gone.* I spent most of my youth being told how incredible it was that I didn’t have an accent from stupid baby boomers who seemed to think that people are born with their language and accent (kind of how multicultural theorists demand a “culturally appropriate” adoption).
This came to mind when reading Reihan Salam’s latest column in Slate, The Melting Pot Is Broken: How slowing down immigration could help us build a more cohesive and humane society. We are always told about Latino immigration, and how they are not fully assimilating. Living in California I have noticed that Mexican Americans (by which I mean those who I know to be born here) often speak with a mild accent. Basically a subcultural dialect. But more alarming to me are cases of children who arrived from Asia before puberty, but who still have an accent. These aren’t kids who grew up in the ghetto, but rather California college towns or Silicon Valley. Often the Balkanization of American society is attributed to socioeconomic gulfs, but this is not the case in the instances which shocked me.
The America I grew up in was clearly not the America after World War II, but its cultural template was still in the shadow of the baby boomers. That was an America where immigrants had to fit into a broader cultural framework as a matter of necessity and often preference. Yes, aspects of uniqueness were maintained, but encapsulation within one’s own community was the luxury for truly numerous subcultures, such as that of blacks or Mexicans Americans. Then multicultural theorists began to promulgate the idea of the “salad bowl” instead of the “melting pot” as a metaphor for American society. The optimistic take was that different threads would operate in harmony in the American mosaic. I’m moderately skeptical of that as a prediction for how the future will play out. Rather, I think the United States is on its way to becoming a much more humane version of Dubai. Economically productive in the aggregate, but dominated by a small coterie which disenfranchises the majority. That’s just a prediction. Since the Age of Jackson we’ve thought of ourselves a democracy more than a republic, and ancient Athens, with its core citizen class and ancillary metics, could be a plausible model for America in 2050.
* My wife still believes that I make a larger than expected number errors in assigning appropriate gender in pronouns when speaking because Bengali has no gender in pronouns.
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