Assimilation Essential For Unity in America    -   October 3, 2020

Dis-assimilation Becomes Disunion – The End of America

Waves of immigrants have adopted American culture and values; assimilation gave them an American identity, and it unified America.  Now, many Americans are rejecting American values in favor of ‘other’ identities.

Assimilation is the merging of different national, racial or ethnic groups into the main cultural body, including abandonment of former norms.  America’s founders recognized its importance for unity.  Alexander Hamilton wrote that “the safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits.”  Washington wanted immigrants to “get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws … become one people.”

In the early 19th century a system of common schools began to educate and assimilate the children of immigrants, and assimilation was a consistent element of American immigration policy until the 1970s.  In 1954, the Supreme Court acted against using race as a basis for separation; Brown v Board of Education invalidated the concept of "separate but equal."

However, faith in our founders’ assimilationist philosophy began to break down in the 1970s as political, educational, corporate, and cultural elites worked to erode national unity by sorting Americans into separate ethnic categories – Whites, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, Muslim Americans, etc.”  Thus, an “other” identity for minorities has been institutionalized, adding to the difficulty of their full assimilation into the larger American society.

Some members of minority groups now seek to maintain a different primary language (or patois), participate in non-American celebrations, reject and denigrate American history and values, and censure members who do not go along.  It is especially disheartening to see this process working among Black Americans, a group that had come so far toward overcoming the ‘otherness’ enforced upon it for so many years by slavery and segregation.

We can resist this trend by ending our support of it including: make English our legal national language; perform government functions and teach school only in English; require that schools teach American history and civics in ways that honor American freedoms and unity; undo systems of welfare that reward ‘otherness;’ and resist commercial strategies of ‘identity’ marketing to specific minority groups.

Unless the process of dis-assimilation is reversed, our national motto of e pluribus unum will become irrelevant; we will no longer be a unified country.

(For more, preview Immigration here.)