Eugene Robinson looks at the riots and France and concludes, inexplicably, that mulitculturalism is a good thing.
The French example presents an ideal laboratory experiment. France, like the United States, bases its sense of nationhood on a set of Enlightenment ideas about the rights of individuals in a society. France, much more than this country, also draws identity from language and an ancient cultural heritage.
But then immigrants began to arrive — mostly former colonials from North and West Africa, people with darker skin and a different cultural and religious heritage. France essentially said to the immigrants: “Look, these are our ideals — liberty, equality, fraternity . We’re not adding diversity to the list.”
It was a deliberate decision, of the kind that opponents of multiculturalism in the United States would have our country make: As a matter of policy, the French refused to acknowledge that cultural and religious differences even existed
Umm, I don’t think so. The French mistake was that they not only ignored the cultural and religious differences of the immigrants in their midst, but that they made no effort to assimilate those immigrants into French society and instead permitted them to live in their enclaves and keep their culture much the same way it was in their home countries.
We have the same problem in our own country. In the past, immigrants were forced to assimilate in order to be able prosper in America. Today, they can live their entire lives in communities where they need only interact with members of their own group and transact business without even having to learn the English language. To that extent, we are making precisely the same mistake the French are now paying the price for.
The failed French experiment proves that you can’t make differences and disparities disappear simply by ignoring them.
No, the failed French experiment proves that allowing immigrant groups to completely insulate themselves from the larger society and not integrate into it will ultimately lead to disaster.
So let’s end all this “English-first” nonsense and embrace Spanish as our second language, since that’s what it is. Let’s learn more about those 5,000 years of Chinese history. Let’s have the dates of Ramadan and Eid noted on our calendars. Let’s remind ourselves of a big, important lesson that we’ve already learned, and that we can teach the world: Multiculturalism works.
Aside from the fact that making America a bilingual nation would, by itself be a recipe for disunity (can anyone say Canada ?), this is precisely what we do not need to do. Instead, we need to remember the lesson that we should have learned when America absored huge numbers of immigrants of Western and Eastern Europe —- the melting pot works.
Linked with The Political Teen and Basil’s Blog and Oblogotory Anecdotes and Don Surber and TMH’s Bacon Bits
