The Melting Pot (Part 2)

And now, the brighter side of the Melting Pot story (that I hate so very very much).

If Americans could just come to the realisation that there is more to the world than the United States and Washington, DC, then it could be a much better country.

If Americans would more readily acknowledge their ancestry and heritage, their country would be more diverse and open-minded.
[ I don't know if I've told the story of my grandmother yet. She hates the fact that her ancestors came to the United States a generation after her husband, my grandfather. She thinks it makes him "more American" than her. I HATE PEOPLE LIKE THAT. ]

By accepting differences in culture... by accepting culture for that matter... America can open its eyes to the world and see how multiculturalism actually benefits the nations in which it is allowed to take place. Here, people who want to uphold their culture were forced to live in ghettos with people of similar background by the pressures of American society. That is wrong.

Even now, in the 21st century, people who are different are treated differently. Not with respect, but as outcasts. In a city of whites and Asians (mostly Chinese), people who are black or Hispanic are treated differently. Not in a cruel way... San Marino is above that... but jokingly. Joking discrimination is still discrimination. I've faced it from Asians, and they weren't joking...........
On a plane to Boston, I sat next to a Chinese boy who was part of a large group of Chinese kids taking a tour of the US. We talked for a while, and he wasn't mean or anything, but when I tried to convert centimetres to feet and inches, having forgotten the decimal conversion, I employed trial-and-error to compare our heights, since he was clearly not fluent enough in English to understand what I was trying to do. Seeing me doing random math problems that ended up just barely incorrect each time, he told me plainly that "white people don't know how to do math ha ha ha". I can tell you right now how much it pissed me off. IT PISSED ME OFF. I'm in Honours Geometry. Last year I was in Accelerated Algebra, Honours Pre-Algebra the year before that, and I was in the Honours programme for the past three years as well. Being told by some Chinese kid that I could barely understand that "white people don't know how to do math" made me want to punch him in the face.

That's way off topic, but the point is, America needs to embrace diversity, not bury it away under the false identity of the Melting Pot.