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The first melting pot was all the white races, the Irish, the English, the Polish, the Germans, the Italians, the French, etc. Back when this country first started, each nationality considered themselves different, and it often created conflict. Like today in many cities where we have the Black side of town, the Hispanic side of town, the white side of town, they had the Italian side of town, the Irish side of town, the Jewish side of town, etc. Over time they all melted together into “Whites.” Most whites in this country are mixed, many not even knowing their full ancestry.

Then we have the Black melting pot, where all those from Africa went into. In Africa there were different tribes and nationalities. Here in the U.S., you’d be lucky to find a Black person that can trace back his ancestry to the original tribes their ancestors came from. Over time, they too were all melted together into what we now call “Blacks.”

You see the same thing with the Hispanics, but they came much later to this country en mass than the Whites and Blacks did. They too are melting together to form “Hispanics.”

Then you have the Asians, who comes from very different cultures, if you study Asians. You have the Chinese, Vietnamese, Hmong, Filipinos and dozens and dozens of other very different cultures and peoples. They too are melting together in the U.S. into the “Asian” melting pot.

So, the concept of the melting pot has always been accurate, just most people do not realize that there are more than one pot.

Now, today, with more and more interracial dating between Blacks, Whites, Asians and Hispanics, we are seeing a new combined melting pot just starting to heat up.

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America is a racist country where one only has to look as far as the recent rabidly and baldly, bold-face racist health care debates to see what is driving the divide. It’s been just beneath the surface and it’s merely using one boil to purge the ugliness, dumping it into the wider society for lack of better exit location.

I mean really? Black people in America are at the very bottom of the life expectancy scale, Black babies die more frequently, birth rates and complications abound, and America is still the only ‘developed’ nation without some kind of widespread public health care system. In some parts of America, it’s worse than the Third World hospital that I had my baby in three years ago, delivered by experienced professionals for FREE.

In America, the issue about everyone having access to health care is being reduced to race, because the system has so utterly failed the Black community, and being accountable as a nation for itself regardless of race or economic station is still impossible for the BRAIN-WASHED GOP supporters to fathom, despite electing Obama. But they’re not the only ones… you are all suffering from a media-created and supported divide that does not exist in nature, only in society’s self-important artifice.

This woman writing this article is a nitwit… and her husband is equally nitwitted. Yet, she is indicative of a lot of middle-class white people who don’t even want to discuss race, because they don’t want to be accused of prejudice or bigotry, one they really dip below the surface language of ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’. I say, just because you’re willing to date outside your ethnic group, does not one iota immunise you from your socialisation and cultural biases.

In fact, if you are this site and ‘dating outside of colour lines’, if you are looking for a ‘serious relationship’ then you better think about the babies you produce. This is the problem I have when you date because of stereotyping. Whether you admit or face it, if you do not consider anything beyond the ‘exotic’ or your shallow interpretation of ‘inter-racial’ and all it means for you and your life, then really, keep it zipped up and your panties on.

Where I come from, even though many people look like me, all golden and clearly mixed ethnicities, we have definite cultural lines, but we don’t experience race the way you do. In Trinidad, politicians try to make it about race for their advantage, but only the very ignorant (small in number) buy into it. The MASS of the population is cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, multi-cultrural, cross-religion and everyone plays Mas for Carnival. We have ONE definitive cultural expression shared across the country that defies definitions of race, class, sexuality, socialisation. It is called CARNIVAL! MAS!

Not saying there aren’t problems, but America could learn a lesson or two about cooking in that melting pot from Trinidad, and public health care from Barbados.

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2) They had no resistance to euro diseases. Many died from simple diseases that euros brought and had resistance to.

3) Slavery did involve native americans at first. But the cash crops needed more tending on a greater scale than their dwindling diseased numbers could provide.

4) The colonial powers used them as allies in military campaigns against other colonial powers. One great chief named Pontiac organized a council of tribal leaders and almost won with the help of the French over all the other colonial powers. His tribal collective system is the basis of our system of national government.

5) Assimilation ease in appearance of descendants of native american slaves would have lead to trouble keeping the rest in slavery.

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We bring whom we are to our present and attract the same.

If you value yourself, you will value others.

Namaste

Faraji (One who is open, from the Sufi Poet, Rumi)

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As far as the melting pot, I think there has always been a look toward homogeneity in this country. Things just hasn’t worked out that well in that direction.

The US of A has developed as a stew rather than a melting pot. Like it or not, there are a wide variety of cultures that have put an indelible stamp on our culture. Reactionary forces try to stem that tide from time to time and as ugly as that gets, it doesn’t really have the desired effect. For example, go to a blues festival and see the face of the audience that keeps that American art form alive. If the forces of homogeneity had won out, the blues would have died out long ago. More currently, hip-hop would have faced that same death.

Words, ideas and cultural phenomenons continue to make their way into the dominant white, male, heterosexual European culture that upon which this country began. With any luck, this country will continue adopting and developing. The growing pains have been fierce but so far have been worthwhile.

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