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Melting pot is a metaphor used to describe the fusion of nationalities, cultures and ethnicities in which culturally diffused societies slowly develop overtime into a multiracial/cultural society. The melting pot theory is most often readily associated with Americans as they were the best example of immigration and cultural fusion in the past. In America, most immigrants in the past adopted the customs of the "society playing host to them, while they in different ways gradually loose their connection to their native culture. The "melting pot" process has long been associated and even equated with the term cultural assimilation, which is a process of integration where people from different cultures and nationalities are accepted into a society as part of their people, and the exchange of cultural practices takes place.
The United States of America was the pioneer of the melting pot theory where minority groups were fully integrated into American culture and institutions. The melting pot further rooted itself when intermarriage between different ethnic groups were no longer seen as a social taboo in 1967. Before that, marriages between the whites and other racial groups, referring especially to African-Americans or other minority groups, had been a form of social taboo in the USA, and was deemed as being completely illegal by the US government, forbidding a child to have mixed ethnic blood.
In the 1800s to the 1900s, constant European immigration to America increased tremendously. Numerous European immigrant groups such as the Italians, Irish and Jews came from all over Europe seeking a better life in the US. Although they entered America as free white citizens, these new immigrants were regarded by numerous Americans as being culturally and racially different from the Anglo-Saxons and other Northern- European people. Although they suffered from much discrimination from the local population, they did enjoy political freedom. Eventually, these people began to be accepted by the local population and were then allowed to intermarry into the American society.
Non-white immigrants, such as African Americans and Hispanics received little acceptance during the nineteenth and the 1950s from the local populace. Only a select few groups of emigrants who were considered to be pure white (such as Armenians and Syrians) were fully integrated into society as citizens by the local people. Countless other ethnic groups like the Indians were considered to be non-white and thus were banned by the law from marrying white women in several states. Not only that, the immigration of Asians, like the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, into the USA, was met with numerous restrictions which made it extremely hard for them to migrate to the USA.
In the early 1900s, the idea of the recent rapidly popularized concept of “The Melting Pot” centered on the issue of immigration. It focused on how immigration had, in the past and present, impacted the American society in different ways and on how the concept of immigration to America should have been approached. It was opposed my many for the fear that the other ethnic races would “undesirable” in their culture. However, due to the great success of the new American Civil Rights Movement, coupled with the enactment and reinforcement of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, immigration from Latin America and Asia rapidly increased, and intermarriage between whites and non-whites became increasingly common. Racial acceptance of the other minority races too increased significantly. This leads back to our topic on cultural fusion and sets the scene for the next page on the concept of meritocracy.
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