A RICH TAPESTRY Cultural mixing is inevitable and has happened throughout human history. It is especially featured in a land of tremendous racial and ethnic diversity, like the United States. Consider the American South. The South represents some of the most intense historic mixing of Scots-Irish, African, Native American, Spanish…

PERSONAL ANTI-RACISM It is an old observation that much racism or race-based hatred is rooted in ignorance. Ignorance, unfortunately, evokes fear and insecurity in a great many people. They lash out in hatred against what they do not understand. So much racial strife is a result of strangers interacting. My…

CULTURAL “AUTHENTICITY” The United States is still such a young nation. Groups like the Sons of Norway are eager to preserve “tradition” such as the Potetlefse (potato lefse) flat bread recipe. But we know potatoes were originally a western hemisphere food. Only well after the Spanish “discovery” of the Americas…

THE FALLACY OF “CULTURAL APPROPRIATION” A number of African Americans understandably disliked Elvis Presley for becoming rich and famous after taking “their” music mainstream.¹ But the fact was, as famous record producer Sam Phillips so ruefully appreciated, white kids would not buy black music during the 1950s. Capitalism may be…

There are multiple, complex factors behind the mass shootings of recent decades in the United States, but clearly they are all related to the nation’s gun culture. How can Americans change such a culture? In fact, how does any society make any massive cultural shift? Many are fond of comparing…

TIRED OLD WASP Assimilation has a bad reputation in certain American academic circles these days, but critics tend to focus solely upon a particular era of the racist past when White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) in the United States tried to forcibly assimilate (or permanently exclude) all non-WASPs. The historic WASP…

DIRECTIONAL ACCULTURATION THROUGH THE LEGAL SYSTEM All cultures change. The key questions and concerns surrounding acculturation involve pace and power. Few want a government, religion, societal majority, or some other force telling them how to change and when. Gradual, voluntary change is what most people seek. They’ll adopt the new…

ASSIMILATION, ACCULTURATION, AND SOME OF THEIR IMPLICATIONS In Ken Burns’ 1996 film The West, writer Rudolfo Anaya observed, “A lot of times when we speak of the meeting of cultures, we forget that beyond the initial clash, emerges a new view of the world. I think that is what Chicanos…

INTRODUCTION A following series of posts are derived from an unpublished book chapter that I began as an essay around 2008, long before the current milieu of hate crime resurgence in the United States. The resurgence threatens to distort our views of a bigger picture of multiculturalism. Partly because I’ve…