scholarly journals Resisting Assimilation to the Melting Pot:

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Freyca Calderon Berumen

The melting pot metaphor suggest that people from different backgrounds come to the United States and through the process of assimilation adapt to a new lifestyle integrating smoothly into the dominant culture. This article argues that immigrants from diverse cultural and ethnic groups that try to keep some of their cultural traditions may encounter conflict when trying to adapt to their life in the new context. The author contends for a cultural curriculum of the home endorsing family cultural values and traditions tha is overlooked by schools and educators, disregarding its potential for enhancing children’s learning process and academic achievement.

Author(s):  
Erik S. Wright ◽  
Rose Baker

The Hawaiian Islands are a diverse melting pot of people, cultures, and languages that make doing business in the state a unique challenge for organizations based on the mainland United States. While Hawaii is indeed the 50th state in the union, culturally they are more closely aligned with Asia and other Polynesian cultures than the United States as a whole. Doing business in Hawaii can often feel as though one is doing business in a foreign country, a place where one only partially speaks the language. Understanding these cultural differences and shaping communication styles to align with the cultural values of the Hawaiian sub-culture is essential to success for any organization planning to start operations in Hawaii. Through a process of cultural analysis, organizations can more effectively manage change within their operations and engage their Hawaiian workforces with great success.


1989 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Waldinger

Research on ethnic enterprise emerged in the United States as part of an attempt to explain the historical differences in business activity between blacks and other ethnic groups. In Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan argued that “the small shopkeeper, small manufacturer, or small entrepreneur of any kind played such an important role in the rise of immigrant groups in America that its absence from the Negro community warrants at least some discussion.”1 Glazer and Moynihan offered some brief, possible explanations, but the first extended treatment came with the publication of Ivan Light's now classic comparison of Blacks, not with Jews, Italians, or Irish, but with immigrants—Japanese, Chinese, West Indians—whose racial characteristics made them equally distinctive; the argument developed an imaginative variant of the Weber thesis, showing that it was ethnic solidarism, not individualism, that gave these immigrants an “elective affinity” with the requirements of small business.


Author(s):  
Michaela DeSoucey

This chapter argues that foie gras was rendered strange, salient, and compelling because of a discernible absence of care—as opposed to the French national “ethic of care” detailed in the previous chapters—for something that is clearly not part of the United States' cultural traditions or even a chapter of the story of the culinary “melting pot” of ethnic food traditions finding their way into mainstream American tastes. Events surrounding the ultimately unsuccessful ordinance banning foie gras—a little-known, luxury food item—in Chicago's restaurants offers a prime example of how chance and contingency can affect the cultural evolution of a city's politics of food.


This essay is a response to Amy Spellacy’s contribution in this book, Global Perspectives on the United States. While he largely concurs with Spellacy, Ibarra wonders about the persistence of Coca Cola as an iconic symbol of “America” in this period of ever-expanding global capitalism. He offers some hypotheses, too, about new ways that Coca Cola ads may be contributing to the current form of U.S. cultural hegemony. Highlighted among these is Ibarra’s idea that Coca Cola’s current messages focusing on diversity of national and ethnic groups may well work with their globalized market interests, and hence that they may display less marked racial and social differentiation than Spellacy found in the 1940s and 1950s ads. Ibarra argues that the contemporary images in Coca Cola ads are more visually egalitarian, but that seemingly successful individuals predominate, thereby imposing mainstream (middle class?) U.S. cultural values, nonetheless. The essay concludes that Coca Cola still functions as a cultural product available to everyone, epitomizing “America” and its values, and that it therefore materially contributes in profound ways to the rise of a new powerful U.S. around the planet.


Author(s):  
Penny Richards ◽  
Susan Burch

The factors driving research into disability history methodology in its practical dimensions (such as finding and analyzing sources and presenting findings), the cultural values that inform it, and who populates intended audiences all contribute to the invisible infrastructure of historical production. When historians of disability access a rich source of data, they also must ask who created it, who benefited from its preservation, and whose stories are left untold. Sharing knowledge—through preservation and dissemination—equally shapes disability historical work. In all of this, access and accessibility—from built spaces and source types to research aids and scholarly products—remain paramount. Ways to proceed with sensitivity and creativity in the exploration of disabled peoples’ and disability’s pasts are presented from the perspective of the United States.


2021 ◽  
pp. 155545892199751
Author(s):  
Mehtap Akay ◽  
Reva Jaffe-Walter

This article details how a newly arrived Turkish refugee student navigates schooling in the United States. It highlights the trauma a purged Turkish families experience in their home country and their challenges as newcomers unfamiliar with their new country’s dominant culture, language, and education system. The case narrative provides insight into how children of Turkish political refugees are often overlooked in the context of U.S. schools, where teachers lack adequate training and supports. By illuminating one refugee family’s experiences in U.S. schools, the case calls for leaders to develop holistic supports and teacher education focused on the needs of refugee students.


Author(s):  
Manjul Gupta ◽  
Carlos M. Parra ◽  
Denis Dennehy

AbstractOne realm of AI, recommender systems have attracted significant research attention due to concerns about its devastating effects to society’s most vulnerable and marginalised communities. Both media press and academic literature provide compelling evidence that AI-based recommendations help to perpetuate and exacerbate racial and gender biases. Yet, there is limited knowledge about the extent to which individuals might question AI-based recommendations when perceived as biased. To address this gap in knowledge, we investigate the effects of espoused national cultural values on AI questionability, by examining how individuals might question AI-based recommendations due to perceived racial or gender bias. Data collected from 387 survey respondents in the United States indicate that individuals with espoused national cultural values associated to collectivism, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance are more likely to question biased AI-based recommendations. This study advances understanding of how cultural values affect AI questionability due to perceived bias and it contributes to current academic discourse about the need to hold AI accountable.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-85
Author(s):  
Anna Boch ◽  
Tomás Jiménez ◽  
Katharina Roesler

Assimilation theories posit that cultural change is part and parcel of the assimilation process. That change can register in the symbols and practices that individuals invoke as part of an ethnic experience. But cultural change also includes the degree to which the mainstream takes up those symbols and practices as part of its composite culture. We develop a way to examine whether cuisine, an important component of ethnic culture, is part of the mainstream’s composite culture and the contextual factors associated with the presence of ethnic cuisine in the composite culture. We begin with a comparison of 761,444 reviews of Mexican, Italian, Chinese, and American restaurants across the United States from Yelp!, an online customer review platform. We find that reviews of Mexican restaurants mention ethnicity and authenticity much more than reviews of Italian and American restaurants, but less than reviews of Chinese restaurants, suggesting intermediate mainstreaming of Mexican cuisine. We then examine Mexican restaurant reviews in the 82 largest U.S. core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) to uncover the contextual factors associated with Mexican cuisine’s local mainstream presence. We find that Mexican food is less defined in ethnic terms in CBSAs with larger and more culturally distinct Mexican populations and at less-expensive restaurants. We argue that regional versions of the composite culture change as ethnic groups come to define a region demographically and culturally.


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