Melting Pot Quotes

“We may not always be happy with the things we do. Talking it through properly with ourselves to get an answer to the missteps we make is essential. We might thus receive an explanation for our blunders. Instead of encaging our emotions, let us go down into the dark net of our subconscious and start transforming our inner world by uncluttering the melting pot of our sensibilities and tuning up our thinking patterns. This may be the start of a new day.
(“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other”
― Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“These are very scary times for a lot of people who are just now realizing that America is not, and has never been, the melting-pot utopia that their parents and teachers told them it was. These are very scary times for those who are just now realizing how justifiably hurt, angry, and terrified so many people of color have been all along. These are very stressful times for people of color who have been fighting and yelling and trying to protect themselves from a world that doesn’t care, to suddenly be asked by those who’ve ignored them for so long, ‘What has been happening your entire life? Can you educate me?”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.”
― Colin Quinn, The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America

“To be American is to long for whatever our parents fled.”
― Colin Quinn, The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America

“Hawai'i has often been called a melting pot, but I think of it more as a 'mixed plate'---a scoop of rice with gravy, a scoop of macaroni salad, a piece of mahi-mahi, and a side of kimchi. Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely 'local' cuisine. This is also, I believe, what America is at its best---a whole greater than the sum of it's parts.”
― Alan Brennert, Honolulu

“Ankh-Morpork, the melting pot of the world, which occasionally runs foul of lumps that don't melt.”
― Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

“Assimilation and melting into the American pot has always been easier [for white people]. It's very hard for blackfolk to melt into the pot. When we melt into the pot we usually become charred crust at the bottom. We have to be able to persevere by different tactics and methods.”
― Chuck D, Lyrics of a Rap Revolutionary, Vol. 1

“We have a bubbling successful melting pot in this country so long as the ingredients are essentially European.”
― Jared Taylor, Convergence of Catastrophes

“It’s almost like that’s the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian… Or becoming a Negro for four years.”
― Josh Alan Friedman, Black Cracker

“Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“America was built on the myth of the melting pot, but despite efforts of the powers that be, the ingredients never fully blended. At best there is a patchwork quilt of various ethnic groups struggling to live peacefully with one another while something called, "mainstream culture" - it looks like a Norman Rockwell painting, sounds like a George Gershwin musical, and tastes like Chef Boyardee - is offered up as the national exmple.”
― Ayana Byrd, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America

“Whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes... What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither a European nor the descendant of a European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. . . . The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared.”
― J Hector St. John

“Jazz certainly has the power to bring out the best in the melting pot experiment we call America.”
― Mark Shaiken, Fresh Start

“Mil olores, tristezas, historias, subían desde el empedrado, se asomaban a los balcones o a los portales de la calle Aribau. […] Mezcla de vidas, de calidades, de gustos, eso era la calle de Aribau. Yo misma: un elemento más, pequeño y perdido en ella.”
― Carmen Laforet, Nada

“Progress is our most important product, General Electric says, and I had progressed to the front door of hell when all I had actually been striving for was a quiet purgatory. And I did not find it strange that hell had a soft blue sky, a springlike air, music, dust, laughter, curses.”
― Charles Stevenson Wright, The Wig: A Mirror Image

“& as for ya’ll tired,
ya’ll poor
ya’ll huddled masses
yearning to breathe free

Fuck ya’ll!”
― James Cagney, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness

“...Carlisle Indian School, the fire beneath the great melting pot.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“The people of America are red, white, black, yellow, and all the shades in between. Their eyes are blue, black, and brown, and all the shades in between. Their hair is straight, curly, kinky, and most of it in between. They are tall and short, slim and fat, athletic and anaemic, and most of them in between. They are the different peoples of the world becoming more and more the “in between.” They are a people creating a new bridge of mankind in between the past of narrow nationalistic chauvinism and the horizon of a new mankind — a people of the world. Their face is the face of the future.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“Today, everyone has come to see the horses, who have been here
for four hundred years. In myth, they descend from a herd
brought on a Spanish galleon & swim ashore to their astonishing
freedom after the ship hits a sandbar in a storm & goes down.
America, this is a scene you have seen before: a dark hull of flesh.
Or they are the descendants of horses set out by farmers to graze
& inexplicably forgotten. You are an assemblage. Natural.
Unnatural. So little of you is not from somewhere else.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“this is not a poor-boy story
this is a pioneer story
this is your story
America are you listening”
― Juan Felipe Herrera, Every Day We Get More Illegal

“look into my eyes America
how easy it is
to dream in Technicolor

o say white say red say blue
and every color
we who made and make you still
we have built
your towers
your tracks your bridges
with our bones

from sea to shining sea this is our home
home is where the heart is
yes all the broken ones”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“when I say love I mean you
when I say home I mean you

when I say to you
we are so beautiful do not turn away
do not shatter America America
for richer for poorer
we are your beautiful bones
your heart
your veins
are made of us
why are you afraid our blood is the same color”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“oh sing with me sing with me what is made one
should not be pulled asunder
we who are embraced
by sweet Lady Liberty
we who are made so beautiful
so varied
so new
so whole again
inside the harbor
of your arms oh America
we are you do you not see

do not lead us into darkness
do not
hate our gods our children
throw us not into camps prisons ghettos
smash your jackboots into us

but deliver yourself
from that dagger
the dagger you can become”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“Does your husband speak English

I say fluently No kidding he says

Where my husband works I say there are folks from all over the world
speaking English with different accents and many
don’t understand each other but it’s OK

No kidding he says and bellows loudly whacks my hand pushes back
his Redwings cap with both hands
The van wanders Cars honk all around I wince”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“We are reminded that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who has recently aggravated our social confusion over the racial issue while allegedly attempting to clarify it, is co-author of a work which insists that the American melting pot didn’t melt because our white ethnic groups have resisted all assimilative forces that appear to threaten their identities. The problem here is that few Americans know who and what they really are. That is why few of these groups–or at least few of the children of these groups–have been able to resist the movies, television, baseball, jazz, football, drum-majoretting, rock, comic strips, radio commercials, soap operas, book clubs, slang, or any of a thousand other expressions and carriers of our pluralistic and easily available popular culture. And it is here precisely that ethnic resistance is least effective. On this level the melting pot did indeed melt, creating such deceptive metamorphoses and blending of identities, values and life-styles that most American whites are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it.”
― Ralph Ellison