THE POT NEVER MELTS (Satis Shroff)

THE POT NEVER MELTS I (Satis Shroff)

ONCE upon a time in a country sandwiched between two great ponds: the Atlantic and the Pacific, there was a big nation of migrants who called themselves Americans. Since the country was ravishingly beautiful but wild, and without infrastructures, millions of people from Europe were invited to create a new white society. They constructed a melting pot theory in which all Europeans (later other earth dwellers too) were to be put in the pot. The melting pot revolutionized the foreigners who entered the melting pot, which carried the name: the United States of America. The motley foreigners were expected to be easily dissolved. They could also be dissolved into tears because the very idea was against human nature.

People from diverse nations were expected to set up an American civilization together. That was the path (The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost, 1916) America had chosen. The Native Americans had no other choice but to subdue and be a part of American history. They were swept by the great migratory current from the Atlantic Ocean, which brought European settlers eager to eke out a new living in the west. They conquered the wilderness and its natives to become colonial masters and give a characteristic shape to the history of Canada, USA and South America. It might be noted that the map of Europe, with its different nations, was also a product of many migrations in the continent.

I met the American writer Ishmael Reed at the Freiburger University's Peterhof cellar, Niemen Strasse 10, for the second time. He was in Freiburg in 1992 with a group of American writers who came formerly from South Asian, Afro-American and Hispanic backgrounds, that is, multicultural authors belonging to the US mainstream out to do 'a striptease of the soul' as one writer put it. Among the writers were: Clark Blaise, a French-Canadian writer married to Bharati Mukerjee, a writer and NY socialite of Indian descent. Then there was J.A. Phillips who wrote about American and Caribbean culture. Ishmael Reed was then associated with new vodooism and was billed as a humorous writer.

Today, Reed is together with Toni Morrison, one of the pre-eminent African American literary figures, most widely reviewed since Ralph Ellison, and also just as controversial as Samuel Delany and the late Amiri Baraka.

Ishmail Reed said: ' I used to be a discipliine problem, which caused me embarrasment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honour.'

Reed's first novel was 'The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) and so far he has written seven novels, four books of poetry, two collections of essays and numerous reviews. His works are multicultural, revolutionary, vivid and contain a deep awareness of mythic archetypes.

Freedom from social, political and religious repression was the cause of migration of people from Egypt to the days of the sailing ships like the 'Mayflower' and the flight of the Hugenotts from a France which was ruled by Ludwig XIV to England, as well as the migration of Jews from Hitler's Third Reich. Then came the Korean and Viernam wars, followed by the Balkan War (Sebrenica), the conflicts in the Hindukush (Afghanistan) in which the Soviets were involved first, and later the USA, the war in Iraq culminating in the bombardment of Syria.

In the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone 250,000 people were killed. In Afghanistan the Tabibans are at the moment about to take over the power. Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad (Pakistan) by the US Seals. Cuba wants Guantanamo back together with financial compensation. If it hadn't been for China, the USA would have experienced a financial collapse in 2008 during the Lehmann-crisis. The IS terror is spreading like a Prarie wildfire in Africa and Syria. The USA has lost its power and influence as a world policeman. Putin's Russia has annexed Crimea. The Ukranians are gradually receiving military assistance from the reluctant US and Nato countries.

Myth of Racism: All humans, whether from the northern or southern hemisphere, have the same physical traits and there are no pure racial types, with the same set of chromosomes. It is interesting to note that ethnologically speaking, all existing races have been fairly thoroughly mixed. Races don't have psychological innate traits. Hitler's theory of a superior Aryan race has long been declared as unscientific by anthropologists and medical scientists. People look different due to their situation over time and environment, and not to anything inborn. Variations in the colour of hair, skin and eyes are due to differences in the amount of the dark pigment melanin, which even causes the blueness of the eyes, when overlain with unpigmented tissues which diffract light.

Racial and social barriers have broken with globalisation. In Brasil, almost half of the genes in the Black population group are of European origin, and in the Americans of African origin the proportion is a quarter.

Racism, the doctrine that one race is inherently superior or inferior to others, is a myth and is the cause of racial prejudice, and is a vulgar superstition believed by the eternally ignorant colonialists and their kind. Education enlightens, and is the only answer to such atrocious, inhuman behaviour and line of thinking.

The Melting Pot, Salad Bowl, US Mosaic, American Pizza, Cultural Pluralism: It is a fact that the US has been, and still is, a country dominated by the whites. In 1776 the founding fathers of the USA chose the motto: 'E pluribus unum.' Out of many, one. These words were to be on the seal of the United States of America, a union of former colonies, the amalgamation of a new nation, thanks to the European enlightenment. In the Declaration of Independence were the words 'All men are created equal' but men in those days meant 'whites only.' Native Americans, Inuiits and African Americans were excluded from this exalted deal.

It was Dr. Martin Luther King, who led civil rights demonstrators, who made their way from Selma to Montgomery on March 22, 1965 in Alabama, who showed moral courage and the non-violent method practiced against the British Raj by Mahatma Gandhi in India, that paved the way for better rights of the underdogs of the American society. The African Americans showed respect for American law and democracy on this day. It was ironical to witness this in a nation built on slave labour after hundreds of years of oppression at the hands of the white mainstream. King finished his speech with the words of the movement's anthem: 'we shall overcome.' When he was finally allowed to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge and made his way to Montgomery with his tired marchers, he said: 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.' In the aftermath of the injustice and racial-tageted problems in Ferguson, and now Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is hoped that justice will be meted out correctly, otherwise the bodycameras which conjour George Orwell's '1984' would be a farce in this world of multimedia justice.

On the other hand, the two million Native American Indians and Inuit people in the USA have had more autonomy, and have had it longer, than their Canadian or Latin American counterparts. Although the US Supreme Court declared that the tribes were 'domestic dependent nations in 1831, that status was largely fiction. Self-government without development gave the Native Americans the responsibility to administer their own property and poverty. Native Americans have the shortest life-spans, highest infant mortality rate, highest school dropout rate and enormous problems than any ethnic group in the USA. Why doesn't the USA sent out Peace Corps volunteers to the American Indian camps, why only to the outside world?

As people and cultures evolve they become more and more distinctive, and diversity works as a function of social evolution. Unity in diversity is what we all strive for in the name of progress and mutual protection. Making and taking the best out of the uniqueness of the diverse population of a nation, and turning it to a blessing by using the people's unique talents and abilities is the future of the USA, UK, European Union and other nations with democracy as its leitmotif. As Crevecoeur observed in 1782, in America 'individuals of all nations are melted into a new American race.' Scott London rightly looks upon the hybridization of America as 'a source of great promise.' According to him, the future belongs to the mestizo: the person who straddles many different worlds and can help explain them to each other.

America reinvents itself. It uses the alchemy of the melting pot and turns 'them' into 'us.' The secret? Motion, dynamics, new genetic combinations, traditions, rituals, communal living, absorption into the American society's different layers. The story of the melting pot is one of earthly redemption with people from all over the world taking part in the American Dream, each according to his or her talent and qualification. Despite the fact that millions of strangers from all continents brought their contradictory genes and temperaments into the melting pot, what came out in the end was a polyglot melange that functioned well. There was kinetic energy gathering to mould a nation, as it had done throughout the past.

Meanwhile, the melting pot theory wasn't working and new models came: the Salad Bowl, American Mosaic, American Pizza and Cultural Pluralism. The Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) still run the mainstream but many citizens from the Salad Bowl are successful and respected society members and future actors in the US political scenario. True multiculturalism still hasn't reached the hearts and mind of the people. 'Yes we can,' said President Obama. President Obama's poetic speeches made the Republical majority in Congress even more thickheaded and they blocked his political moves whereever they could. The question is whether Hillary Clinton can do better with her prose-text. She's clever, belongs to the white mainstream and knows the ropes in the White House administration as well as external affairs.

Immigration causes also a brain drain in terms of well-trained professionals from industrially underdeveloped countries who leave for the USA or Europe in search of better jobs and living standards. The wage difference between the USA and its neighbour Mexico alone is 15 to 1. The risk of poverty in the USA is part of the bargain, whether the motivation is political or economic repression. What about Americans or Europeans? The pioneer days are long over and there's no redistribution of talent. Americans trickle to developing countries as peace corps and volunteers of other NGOs. The impact is minimal in comparison to the brain drain to the Europe or the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

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THE POT NEVER MELTS II (Satis Shroff)

Like in the UK, the second generation children of migrants who grew up in the USA were self-conscious about their acquired American status and refused to speak the native language of their parents. They married outside the ethnic groups, moved out of ethnic ghettos where their parents felt safe, and Americanized themselves. They believed in the melting pot theory of American culture. The ethnic ingredients didn't melt and remained separate, like islands of individual entities. Wearing American apparels and putting on a pseudo-American accent only hlped change their public image, but in their inner world they hadn't become Americans.

Today,the fourth and fifth generation Americans are proud of their heritage as Indo-Americans, German-American, Russian-Americans and Asian-Americans, and are loyal, true-to-the-heart US citizens. There are more than 38 million foreign-born residents in the USA, which makes 12 per cent of the population.

In the UK the Ukip Party has made the run with the immigrant debate in the past years, and even conservative and labour parties opted for a harder line on migrants. Britain is actually a globalised country with a huge, hardworking, mobile electorate born abroad in its former colonies. Such British citizens find this kind of rhetoric awfully alienating. According to a report, the country that provides the most foreign-born voters in England and Wales is India, followed by Pakistan, the Irish republic and Bangladesh. The message that migrants are an equal and valued part of 21st century Britain is still not evident.

When the Caribbean migrants arrived in Tilbury Docks (UK) in 1948, many of them Jamaican veterans of World War II, the London Evening Standard ran a headline: 'Welcome Home.' But the welcome was hastily erased later in the inappropriate move to slam the open door in Britain. Caribbeans recruited as British citizens to help solve the post-war labour shortage were soon disabused. Nevertheless, it is heartening to note that their largely British-born children have assumed a steadily growing prominence in many sectors of British life. Writer Caryl Phillips' debut novel 'The Final Passage' paid his tribute to his parents's generation of West Indians who came to England in the fifties in search of a better life in the motherland of the English language. In his travel book 'The European Tribe' (1987) he spoke for his generation who were black and British, and the 'subtle and unsubtle ways that I did not belong.'

However, in the long run it is hoped that democracy in western countries (USA, UK, Germany and Europe in general) can help to bridge the gap and allow us to live more peaceably.

After 9/11 and the threat of Islamic States (IS), Americans alternate between hospitality and paranoia, much like Germans with the influx of refugees from war-torn countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and even peaceful Balkan countries such as Albania, Madedonia and Kosovo. In Germany the neonazis, old nazis and the pegida movement centered around Dresden want to have a white race Germany and they have angst of a Moslem majority in the hoary future. In Germany, the trauma of World War II is long over, and the country has become prosperous, thanks to the US Care-Packets, the Marshal Plan and the Wirtschaftwunder in the fifties. The Berlin Wall has fallen and the Germans in the West were obliged to help build the former East Germany, which had been ruined by the communists, by means of a compulsory fund. The job is done, but Germany population is getting old and needs young people to finance and guarantee the pensions, medical tabs and other gerontological bills of the elderly generation.

Germany, like America, offered a prize to workers from the poorer southern parts of the European continent. The prize was good wages, its freedom and German culture and language. The American sidewalks weren't paved with gold and the houses, and the industrial complexed had been bombed and razed to the ground by the Allies. So when the work of reconstructing Germany began, the foreign workers were obliged to take up jobs that didn't suit their qualifications because there was a language barrier, and the foreign qualifications were haughtily not recognised by the German authorities. A colleague of mine was a dentist from Warsaw (Poland) but had to do the work of an office secretary. Why? Because she hadn't studied in Germany and didn't have a German degree. Russian physicians with degrees from Moscow University had to work as taxi-drivers in NY. Most of the imported manpower was for the industries, mining, railroad construction, autobahn and the catering service in hotels and restaurants. Those who managed to save their money, and get additional credits from German banks, became restaurant owners with the help of their families.

A good many first generation families bought or built houses in countries of their origin such as Turkey, Kurdistan, Italy, Greece but their grandchildren and children, who grew up in Germany, preferred the German way of life and generation-conflicts ensued. A house in the Black Forest, in Hamburg, Munich, Mannheim or Heidelberg was much prized due to the modern infrastructure, school and college friends, language, mentality and, most of all, better job prospects.

To put it mildly, both Americans and Germans have been lately asking themselves: 'how many foreigners can we take?'

The rage and aversion is centered on strangers who can't boast of the Rennaisance and an all-white genetic code, who were not colonialists but colonized, and didn't have democracy and pray to another God. It was no other than Benjamin Franklin who once asked in 1751: 'why should Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and, by herding together, establish their language and manners, to the exclusion of ours.' Pennsylvania, which was founded by the English, became a colony of foreigners (Germans) and soon became so numerous as to Germanize the English settlers, instead of the other way round. In Germany today there is this fear of being outnumbered and politically outmanouvred by new citizens from foreign countries.

Xenophobia has always existed everywhere in this world. Perhaps it's high time to fix immigration and fulfill America's promise as a nation of immigrants with their own cultural, religious and racial identity living in an atmosphere of mutual trust and understanding. I wish Germany and the other EU countries the same.