Salad Bowl or Melting Pot?

The Black Community. The Asian Community. The Hispanic Community. The White Community? Why is it often so separate like that? Why can’t it just be the American Community or even just simply a Community? I realize this is not the case for everyone but in many ways I’m beginning to see why people have begun to say that America is more of a “salad bowl” rather than a “melting pot.” I never really noticed this when I was younger because I’ve always lived in a small town and had a fair amount of friends of different ethnicities and if someone there did only make friends with people of the same ethnicity as them (and they weren’t Caucasian), they probably wouldn’t have had too many friends. Since I’ve come to college, though, there are now many more people around me, including more people who are a different ethnicity than me. What I often see, though, is that people of similar ethnicities seem to gravitate towards one another. This is understandable, considering people typically prefer to have friends with something in common with them, but if people become almost exclusive to whom they are friends with, it almost cancels out what diversity there was in the first place (and Miami didn’t have much diversity to begin with…). This is not just a problem of Miami, however. I have heard that there are similar situations at other schools, such as OSU, and probably in many cities, too. This is even seen in some instances in the books we have read where people such as Birdie or Rayona aren’t accepted into certain groups (Birdie at the Nkruma school and Rayona in the Reservation’s youth group) simply based on skin color (a reflection of their slightly differed ethnicity). Apparently, this phenomenon even occurs within “ethnic groups” as well. I recently clicked on a friend’s event on Facebook when I was bored one day and was lead to Kappa Phi Lambda’s 4th Annual Asian Awareness Week (Kappa Phi Lambda is an primarily Asian sorority on many college campuses). On the itinerary for this event is a discussion on “Asian Segregation on Campus – Why do we do it?” questioning why “the Chinese kick it with the Chinese. The Koreans only stick to themselves. The international students don’t like to mingle.” Though I believe it is in many cases a good thing to maintain one’s cultural identity, I feel that in many ways this “salad bowl” trend (which, as I stated before, is only a generalization and NOT the case for everyone) actually inhibits cross-cultural understanding.