The Myth Of The Melting Pot
American Society is increasingly segregated. The Melting Pot is a myth that we need to bust if we want to understand the United States for what they really are: an incomplete project.
Immigration runs in the veins of the United States. The American is just someone who — or whose ancestors — left everything behind to chase after that dream. Now they wave the star sprangled banner in their yard, to remind themselves of what they are, and forget what they had been.
America is the homeland of those who have no home. It’s a place where colors sounds languages rythyms interlace like the threads of the flags that unites them. This is the America we study at school, the melting pot society, where “little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls”. Here, everybody can dream to be anybody no matter what.
This is true if we ignore one dimension: space.
It’s not enough to put diverse people together. You need to overcome the boundaries between them if you want to have harmony. Centuries of racial (and class) discrimation have left a wound far from recovered: spatial segregation.
Racial Segregation In Colours
This is the demographic map of Chicago.
The blue dots represent the Afro-American population. Reds the white. Yellows the hispanic.
As you can see, Chicago is not one city. It’s a continent. Those clusters of colours are micronations, with customs, norms, identities.
Separing them, real borders: bridges and roads mark the internal topography of a divided Chicago, where blacks have their own neighbourhoods, schools, hospitals, as well as whites. And their paths do not meet.
Yet Chicago is regarded as a melting pot society. 33% of the population is white, 29% black, 18% Hispanic and there is a good 20% of “others”. If we stop at the numbers, it seems like a paradise for racial integration.
We just happeen to forget that almost every piece of data has a spatial component that needs to be taken into account. Most of times, maps > graphs.
Indeed, those numbers do not tell us where people live. Chicago is big, there’s room for everyone, even for segregation. Thus, in Oak Park, a residential neighbourhood where Ernest Hemingway was born, 90% of families are white. In Cicero, a few miles south, live only Mexicans.
Is Chicago an exception?
This is Washington DC, cut by the Potomac river. Right from the Washington Monument, the cradle of the American Constitution (“We believe that […] all men are created equal…”), the city is is split in half. White people on the West shore, black on the East.
What prevents black people in Washington from crossing the Potomac and settling West? There are 9 bridges and 2 subway lines, it’s not a matter of comfort. There’s a force that confines black people on the eastern shore, the same force that divides whites and hispanics in Chicago, that ghettoizes the Chinese of San Francisco, or the black of the Bronx.
There is no American metropolis in which those dots mix. This force has resisted Martin Luther King, the struggles for Civil Rights, the end of Jim Crow, the social disapproval of racism. This force is racial segregation.
This is how it works
In his book Micromotives and Macrobehavior, Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling looks at how our daily actions, added to the thousands of other actions individuals around us perform, give birth to unpredictable macroscopic phenomena.
Schelling constructs a model to explain segregation in American cities. According to him, the maps we have seen before are simply the result of individual discriminatory behaviors, even small ones. The problem is that they add up, in a domino effect that drives racial segregation.
Schelling shows that you don’t need a very racist society to have segregation It’s enought that everyone is a little bit racist.
For example, let’s take a multi-ethnic city. There, a white family wants to live in a neighborhood where at leats 30% of the sorrounding households are white. They don’t need to live in an all-white neighborhood, they’re happy with that 30%. We can say they are just 30% racist.
However, if all families in the area are willing to relocate unitil they satisfy that 30% threshold, what you get is the figure below:
Even small racist behaviours lead to a high degree of segregation. Move after move, people tend to isolate in their own ethnic group and to erect social boundaries with other groups. With Schelling’s model of segregation in mind, demographic maps acquire a whole new meaning.
If Schelling is right, the concentration of whites in Manhattan (red on the map) and that of African-Americans in the Bronx (blue) is the result of lifestyle choices of New Yorkers, who, like all their compatriots, demonstrate this intrinsic tendency to segregation.
Under this light, the problem seems unsolvable. How can we hope for racial integration if even in New York, where racial prejudice is at the lowest in the country, colours still tend not to mix? Is it really mathematically impossible to have an integrated society, where different ethnic groups mix in schools, on the streets or in supermarkets?
There are two possible solutions. According to Schelling’s model, if a family is willing to be surrounded by families of other ethnicity, if it takes that threshold to below 10%, then segregation can be avoided. But this requires a cultural effort that is unlikely in the short term. The other road to integration passes through politics. And someone has already taken it.
Singapore: the Ethnic Integration Policy
There are 6 milion people living in Singapore, an independent island-city-country south of Malaysia. Singapore doesn’t have a nationality: its identity is based on the diversity of its people. There are 4 official languages and an indefinite number of ethnic groups. To give an idea of the differentiation in Singapore, this is its religious affiliation: there‘s a bit of everything.
Harmony between different ethnic groups has been the cornerstone of Singapore’s success ever since it gained independence in 1965. As a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, there’s a collective effort to ensure that Singaporeans have as many possible opportunities to interact with people of different ethnic groups, starting from childhood.
For Singaporean politicians, the key ingredient in their recipe for social harmony is the EIP (Ethnic Integration Policy: quite eloquent). The EIP ensures that in every apartment building in the city there is a mixture of ethnic groups, setting a percentage beyond which individuals of a certain ethnic group can no longer settle. For instance, no block can be composed by more than 65% of Chinese.
In this way, they avoid having Chinese-only (or Malasyian-only, Indian-only etc.) neighborhoods. This form of forced integration allows Singaporeans to unite under a single flag, despite the somatic, linguistic and cultural differences dividing them. There’s no neighborhood in Singapore where people only speak Chinese, or where they only play cricket; everywhere there are colours that mix, different hands that shake. Singapore is a melting pot society. New York is not: but it could be.
The Contact Hypothesis
The barriers of racial hate arise above the physical barriers that separate us. If we leave people free to isolate themselves, out of prejudice or fear, they will end up self-segregating. And if there’is no contact between different ethnic groups, there’s no social harmony.
Racial integration can only be the result of racial interaction. As the contact hypothesis introduced by Harvard social psychologist Gordon Allport demonstrates, staying in close contact with people of different ethnic groups significantly reduces outer-group prejudice. This is what happens to those who study abroad: when the walls around us are removed, those inside us also collapse.
That’s why you need to put different people together: on the bus, at schools, at hospitals, at cinemas. And you start by making them live together, instead of letting them confine themselves in “Little Italy”, “Little India” or “Chinatown”.
The United States are a promise. With all that diversity there really is a chance to paint a magnificent picture. This only happens if the colours mix, starting with those dots on the maps. It depends on our idea of social harmony, on our idea of victory, hoping that it reflects the word of Amanda Gorman, who in the poem she recited at Joe Biden’s inauguration writes:
“Victory won’t lie in the blande,
But in all the bridges we’ve made.”
