Admittedly, Alba is really talking about assimilation, but more about identification. With so many on the political left and so many "immigrants" talking about maintaining their racial heritage, we may be losing what it means to be American. I like this from Ham:
The movement to make English the official language of America is, in part, a response to the Left’s active discouragement of assimilation. Even the idea of the “melting pot” went out of style when I was in grade school, replaced in text books by the less offensive “mosaic.” You see, now we don’t do anything so gauche as melt into one, cohesive society. Instead, we are all obligated to hold onto our various ethnic and cultural identities and languages, building little barriers between communities, lest we be accused of “selling out” or trying to be too “white.”So answer this question: what is "being white" about? Al Pacino is white. I am white too, and my upbringing is no doubt very different than Al Pacino's. Similarly, my best friends in the Navy was from Oklahoma and Iowa. While their upbringings might have been similar, they were radically different than mine--they were white. Another good friend in college, who was black, had a very similar upbringing to mine, living in a military family and his father too was Navy enlisted. He came from New Jersey and I from Florida.
What I am trying to say, and I think what Ham is saying, is that experiences make us who we are as a nation and as a people. Shared expereinces bind a people together. That is not to say that individual or small group experiences are irrelevant, but you can't emphasize those differences and grow as a person or as a society.
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