Multiculturalism

While what one might call the multicultural mode or inclination first entered the verbal imagination in the United States in 1935, the OED does not recognize its nominal usage until 1957; “multiculturalism” found its way and allied to multilingualism in the journal Hispania. But before the term entered the lexicon, and certainly before it became part of a popular if not normative understanding of how to negotiate cultural difference, it was quite the vexed notion. In 1784, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur published Letters from an American Farmer, which includes the now famous chapter “What Is an American?” to which he answers in part, “Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world” (55). Crèvecoeur sought to demonstrate that an American was one who left aside past prejudices in favor of a presumably more egalitarian mode of relationship with one’s compatriots. Yet even in this very early, proto-formulation of what would later be known as the “melting pot,” this “new race of man” could not account for a major challenge: how to incorporate those who did not hail from Europe, most notably in Crèvecoeur’s day Native Americans figured as uncivilized and blacks held in slavery, in both the North and South. By extension, then, “American” demanded a kind of cultural sameness to which nonwhite groups were required to enter in order to be marked as belonging to the United States. As the U.S. moved through its early republican phase, this conundrum persisted: not only would we engage in civil war to answer the question of slavery, but the lead-up to and execution of the war foregrounded the question of how to belong to this “American crucible.” Many Irish, cast as demonstrably nonwhite throughout their mass wave of immigration in the first half of the nineteenth century, refused in 1863 to participate in the Union effort—to help liberate African Americans from slavery—so committed were they to adhering to the mantle of whiteness via the ideology of white supremacy. The irony then to the “melting pot” is that on the one hand it was seen as the cultural and ideological antagonist to cultural and social segregation; the notion of the melting pot and its sociological successor, Robert Park’s “assimilation” cycle, might be viewed as early expressions of and experiments in multiculturalism, as both subscribed to the idea—against prevailing and even dominant understandings of racial biologism—that peoples might indeed interact and change on the cultural level. On the other hand, that conformity to a singular cultural end product, “American,” was a given was at best a compromise between virulent white supremacy on the one hand and what contemporary assimilationists would disparage as cultural relativism on the other. Until the later twentieth century, even the most charitable recognition of difference-in-equality presupposed a cultural, not to mention legal, desire for white belonging.