Melting Pot - United States

United States

In terms of immigrants to the United States, the "melting pot" process has been equated with Americanization, that is, cultural assimilation and acculturation. The "melting pot" metaphor implies both a melting of cultures and intermarriage of ethnicities, yet cultural assimilation or acculturation can also occur without intermarriage. Thus African-Americans are fully culturally integrated into American culture and institutions. Yet more than a century after the abolition of slavery, intermarriage between African-Americans and other ethnicities is much less common than between different white ethnicities, or between white and Asian ethnicities. Intermarriage between whites and non-whites, and especially African-Americans, has long been a taboo in the United States, and was illegal in many US states (see anti-miscegenation laws) until 1967.

Read more about this topic:  Melting Pot

Famous quotes related to united states:

    “When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing to the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States
    His laughter tinkled among the teacups.
    I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees,
    And of Priapus in the shrubbery
    Gaping at the lady in the swing.”
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    “The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—’indoctrination’ we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
    —Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

    “Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
    —Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    “Falling in love with a United States Senator is a splendid ordeal. One is nestled snugly into the bosom of power but also placed squarely in the hazardous path of exposure.”
    —Barbara Howar (b. 1934)