Toppling the Melting Pot

José-Antonio Orosco

Description

The catalyst for much of classical pragmatist political thought was the great waves of migration to the United States in the early twentieth century. José-Antonio Orosco examines the work of several pragmatist social thinkers, including John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams, regarding the challenges large-scale immigration brings to American democracy. Orosco argues that the ideas of the classical pragmatists can help us understand the ways in which immigrants might strengthen the cultural foundations of the United States in order to achieve a more deliberative and participatory democracy. Like earlier pragmatists, Orosco begins with a critique of the melting pot in favor of finding new ways to imagine the civic role of our immigrant population. He concludes that by applying the insights of American pragmatism, we can find guidance through controversial contemporary issues such as undocumented immigration, multicultural education, and racialized conceptions of citizenship.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Three Models of the Melting Pot
2. Cultural Pluralism and Principles of Pragmatist Solidarity
3. From Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island: Louis Adamic and Cultural Flourishing
4. W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Cultural Contribution to US Deep Democracy
5. Josiah Royce's Deliberative Democracy for Multicultural Conflict and Education
6. Aliens and Neighbors: Jane Addams and the Reframing of the Undocumented Immigration Debate
7. Cesar Chavez and the Pluralist Foundations of US American Democracy
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Pragmatism

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 17 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253023223
• Langue: English

Extrait

TOPPLING THE MELTING POT
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
John J. Stuhr, editor
Editorial Board
Susan Bordo
Vincent Colapietro
John Lachs
No lle McAfee
Jos Medina
Cheyney Ryan
Richard Shusterman
TOPPLING THE MELTING POT
Immigration and Multiculturalism in American Pragmatism
Jos -Antonio Orosco
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Jos -Antonio Orosco
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Orosco, Jos -Antonio.
Title: Toppling the melting pot : immigration and multiculturalism in American pragmatism / Jos -Antonio Orosco.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Series: American philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021012 (print) | LCCN 2016031830 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253022745 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023056 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023223 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Pragmatism. | United States-Emigration and immigration. | Multiculturalism-United States.
Classification: LCC B832 .O755 2016 (print) | LCC B832 (ebook) | DDC 144/.30973-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021012
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Three Models of the Melting Pot
2 Cultural Pluralism and Principles of Pragmatist Solidarity
3 From Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island: Louis Adamic and Cultural Flourishing
4 W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Cultural Contribution to US Deep Democracy
5 Josiah Royce s Deliberative Democracy for Multicultural Conflict and Education
6 Aliens and Neighbors: Jane Addams and the Reframing of the Undocumented Immigration Debate
7 Cesar Chavez and the Pluralist Foundations of US American Democracy
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I T SEEMS FITTING that a book about pragmatist community and solidarity should recognize those individuals whose gifts of wisdom, collegiality, and friendship contributed toward its completion. This book would not have been possible without the encouragement of Tony Vogt, Lani Roberts, Scott Pratt, Gregory Pappas, Carlos Sanchez, Kim Diaz, Andy Fiala, Grant Silva, and Jose Jorge Mendoza; all of whom gave me thoughtful commentary on the work and its subject matter at different times. Every one of them has suggested books and authors that opened up for me cavernous pathways to new and exciting areas in immigration studies, racial justice, and US American philosophy. Any shortcomings in the work are, however, entirely my own. I benefitted enormously from probing comments from audiences at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (and its excellent Summer Institute), the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World, the Radical Philosophy Association, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Worchester State University, and Lone Star Community College, North Harris in Houston. I gained a great deal of insight, and had a lot of fun, examining some of these pragmatist philosophers with my students at Oregon State University; in particular, Matt Enloe, Sione Filimoehala, and Sean Tipton helped me to find new dimensions to works I thought I already knew well.
I am grateful to Dee Mortensen, John Stuhr, and their staff at Indiana University Press for being so supportive and to the press reviewers for probing questions. It was the late Helen Tartar who encouraged me to begin this project; her passing is a great loss to the world of US American philosophy. Many thanks to Naomi Linzer for her expert touch in preparing the index.
For my family and friends, I owe great debts of appreciation for their love and support-in particular, Flora, Theresa, Marta, and Jeen-Marie, thank you all for your care, time, patience, and laughter with me as I worked on this project. I want to dedicate this book to my children, Sophie Orosco and James Liberato. I hope they continue to imagine a world of wonder, possibility, and play and can be inspired by such visions all their lives.
Parts of chapter 1 dealing with Madison Grant appeared in an earlier essay: Jose Vasconcelos, White Supremacy, and the Silence of American Pragmatism, Inter-American Journal of Philosophy , vol. 2, no. 2 (December 2011), pp. 1-13. Parts of chapter 5 appeared earlier in Cosmopolitan Loyalty and the Great Global Community: Royce s Globalization, Journal of Speculative Philosophy , vol. 17, no. 3 (Fall 2003), pp. 204-215. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as Aliens and Neighbors: Jane Addams and the Reframing of Illegal Immigration, Radical Philosophy Review , vol. 14. no. 2 (Fall 2011) 207-215.
TOPPLING THE MELTING POT
Introduction
It is not true that all creeds and cultures are equally assimilable in a First World nation born of England, Christianity, and Western civilization. Race, faith, ethnicity and history leave genetic fingerprints no proposition nation can erase . Race matters. Ethnicity matters. History matters.
-Patrick Buchanan, State of Emergency
T HESE THOUGHTS ABOUT contemporary immigration to the United States, penned by conservative political commentator Patrick Buchanan, hearken back to heated debates at the beginning of the twentieth century. 1 The first decade of that century saw a great surge of immigration to the United States. Many of the newcomers came from Eastern and Southern Europe rather than the traditional places of origin for European Americans. These diverse waves of immigrants occasioned significant cultural soul searching among the US American public about the foundations of our national identity. 2 Indeed, many iconic images of immigrant life in the United States, such as huddled masses waiting at Ellis Island, or ships passing the Statue of Liberty with eager passengers, were forged at this time. It was during this period that the term melting pot was coined as a metaphor for describing the process by which newcomers ought to be absorbed into mainstream society. This melting pot metaphor still resonates profoundly with US Americans today.
Buchanan, however, challenges the common interpretation of this metaphor. We are mistaken, he maintains, if we take the melting pot ideal to mean that immigrants have a right to come to the United States and retain their culture, as long as they pledge allegiance to certain distinct political values or constitutional propositions. Along with the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, Buchanan argues that the United States is not, at its fundamental core, an immigrant nation to which any ethnic group can assimilate. Instead, the United States is a settler nation whose political culture and institutions were essentially defined by the original Anglo-Saxon pioneers and their ways of life. 3 Liberal immigration policies that recommend open borders threaten the social and political stability of the United States, they both argue, because such regulations permit large groups of foreigners, who may not share these ethnic or cultural foundations, to enter and stay in the country. Huntington is somewhat measured in his assessment of the impact of open immigration policies: if the United States allows immigrants with vastly different histories and cultural values from the original settlers to enter, and to preserve their ways of life here, then we ought not to expect that the United States will be as stable, or as prosperous, as it was in the past. Buchanan is definitely more alarmist about a multiethnic and multicultural United States: Should America lose her ethnic-cultural core and become a nations of nations, America will not survive. 4
While there have been several notable defenses of the idea of multicultural democracy in the philosophical works of Will Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh, Charles Taylor, and Jurgen Habermas over the past twenty years, Buchanan and Huntington now join a critical mass of some feminists, liberal political philosophers, and an increasing number of Western Europe s major political leaders, who all wish to raise doubts about multiculturalism as a viable political ideal. 5 Germany s Angela Merkel, France s Nicholas Sarkozy, and Great Britain s David Cameron have all declared in recent years that the notion of a culturally pluralistic democratic society that allows immigrants of different ethnicities and religions to live side by side in toleration with one another, and with the majority population, is a failure. These politicians state that permitting immigrants to retain their cultural or religious differences consigns those groups to marginal and economically deprived lives within mainstream European society. Most worrisome to them, however, is the thought that such marginalization could lead young immigrants to seek a sense of community within radical, fundamentalist religious groups that are prone to violence. Examples of this include the case of Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot and killed controversial Dutch filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, in 2004, after the latter had released a film critical of Islam, or the four British youth that carried out suicide bombings on London s public transportation system in 2005, killing fifty-two people. All of these European leaders agree that more suppo