The Patriot Post® · America Should Still Be a Cultural Melting Pot

“Woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms — they’re not who America is,” stated former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker.”

How dare he! was essentially the collective response from mainstream media pundits, for whom the term “multiculturalism” — an impossibly self-contradictory concept when one stops to think about it — has become the unassailable representative term for equality. CNN’s Keith Boykin blasted Pompeo by erroneously asserting, “This country was built on multiculturalism. That’s why a descendant of Italian immigrants like you could become secretary of state. You should know this history. If you don’t, you should never have been secretary of state.”

Well then, why wasn’t Pompeo speaking in Italian? The truth is, America was not built on “multiculturalism,” rather it is a melting pot where many different people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds blend in and assimilate to the dominant American culture. In so doing, the culture may be enriched and expanded, but it’s never eliminated.

Multiculturalism, on the other hand, seeks to destroy the idea of a dominant uniting culture by erroneously asserting that all cultures are essentially of equal value, irrespective of their distinct values and traditions.

“Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism,” the brilliant Thomas Sowell once wrote. “[It], like the caste system, paints people into the corner where they happen to have been born. But at least the caste system does not claim to benefit those at the bottom.”

One particular inner-city Philadelphia elementary school serves to prove Sowell’s observation correct. Christopher Rufo, writing for City Journal, notes, “The William D. Kelley School has long been one of the most troubled in the district. The school’s student population is 94 percent black and 100 percent ‘economically disadvantaged.’ Academically, it is one of the worst-performing schools in Pennsylvania. By sixth grade, only 3 percent of students are proficient in math, and 9 percent are proficient in reading. By graduation, only 13 percent of Kelley students will have achieved basic literacy.”

However, the school administration, imbibing from the bankrupt and irrational ideology of multiculturalism, has “abandoned traditional pedagogy in favor of political radicalism” and “has embraced the philosophy of ‘anti-racism’ … promising to ‘[dismantle] systems of racial inequity.’” Rufo adds, “The local teachers’ union produced a video denouncing the United States as a ‘settler colony built on white supremacy and capitalism’ that has created a ‘system that lifts up white people over everyone else.’” So, instead of working harder to ensure that its students are actually educated, the school administration has chosen to indoctrinate with the propaganda of hopelessness.

A New York City public school has recently been exposed for promoting this “anti-racism” ideology, as parents of students attending East Side Community School received a graphic in which they were encouraged to become “white traitors” and “white abolitionists.”

At the heart of multicultural “woke” consciousness is the ironically dubbed “anti-racism,” which in practice actually promotes genuine racism. Indeed, “anti-racism” might better be classified, as Pompeo keenly observed, as anti-Americanism, because it dubiously rewrites all of American history and culture as one founded on the racism of white supremacy and slavery. Anti-racism advocates for the destruction of America’s “systemic racism” — or, to put it more accurately, the dismantling of American Liberty and free-market economy to be replaced with an equity-based system (communism), wherein one’s social status is determined by one’s position on the Left’s victimology hierarchy.