Once upon a time, a lot of people thought of America as a sociological “melting pot”, a place where everyone could easily gave up the language and heritage of their ancestors and became red-blooded Americans. This really isn’t (or wasn’t) such a new idea. As with many things about America, this was tried many centuries ago in the Roman Empire. Back in the second and third centuries, you could relinquish your past, whether as an Egyptian, a Syrian, a Turk, a Greek, an Algerian, a Spaniard, a Brit, or even a Frenchman, and simply be a Roman. Even though you’d still look like someone from Africa or England or the Middle East, the powers that be in Rome would treat you like one of them, so long as you wanted to be one of them, and would speak their language (good old Latin).

Of course, most Americans today don’t have much regard for the Roman Empire or Greek Civilization, even though those things are the blueprints for America, like it or not. Until the late 1950s, the education system made sure that everyone knew something about the ancient Romans and Greeks. However, by 1960, the focus in the schools shifted to math and science. Why teach kids about the past, when America’s future lies in the miracle of science and technology?

Yea, we now see how far that idea got us; we have a world with plenty of information technology, but not much wisdom. I think it’s time to start learning something about the ancient Romans and Greeks again. Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. We sure seem to be going down the road of repetition these days.

Nevertheless, let’s go back to the American melting pot theory. A lot of immigrant groups have gone along with the cultural melting process, but some just didn’t. Or not to the same degree, anyway. Perhaps the biggest example is the African-American culture. Despite the fact that many or perhaps even most African-Americans today just want to live normal American middle-class lives, African-Americans are still recognized as a very distinctive component of American culture. And yes, I know that there is a long history of oppression and injustice involved with that. But for now, I’m just looking at the surface. If you came from Pluto as an interplanetary Alexis de Tocqueville to do a study on America in the early 21st Century, you’d keep hearing a lot about “blacks” or African Americans. You’d get more buzz about them more than about Irish-Americans or Chinese-Americans or German-Americans or even Hispanic-Americans (although Hispanics also maintain a distinct and noticeable cultural identity).

In a lot of ways, the continuing cultural distinctiveness of Black America reflects continued injustice and closed-mindedness on the part of the majority cultures. And that’s something to be regretted. Having said that, let me say that I myself rather enjoy the ongoing cultural distinctiveness that African-Americans maintain. Sure, it’s too bad about all the frictions and bad feelings that result sometimes because of this, but there’s something about being black that’s just too good to be melted away into the American soup. I have heard stories about white people (like myself) who have left the highly integrated east coast urban areas to live out in Indiana or Wyoming, so that they won’t have any blacks around them. That makes me cringe. No African-Americans around? Sounds extremely bland.

Yes, I know that certain African-American leaders might criticize what I say here as a form of plantation mentality, like the old notion that “darkies are very entertaining, just so long as we keep them in their place”. Sort of an Amos and Andy thing. To which I reply, I think that blacks have just as much of a place at Yale, Princeton, Microsoft, the Senate and the Space Shuttle as anyone of my ancestral culture. But despite continuing progress and achievement, the African-American culture is still maintaining a cultural distinctiveness, and I like it.

Here’s an example. This past week I went to a funeral service for the father of an African-American executive from my workplace. The deceased was an attorney who served as a municipal judge, worked for several years with Thurgood Marshall (first black US Supreme Court Judge) in desegregation efforts, and was generally a pillar of his community. The officiates of the funeral were, not surprisingly, black. And actually, most of the service wasn’t all that different from any of the white funerals I’ve been to. But at one point, actually two, a handsome man with a good voice went to the podium to sing a gospel song (one was Amazing Grace, I forget the other). He did it with a mixture of flair and dignity, adding an occasional smile and even a gesture at the decedent lying there in the coffin. Perhaps the Rev. Al Green got started like that. But hey, I thought, there’s an interesting idea — a bit of entertainment during a funeral. It made the whole thing, well, not so funereal. It was just another one of those little ways that blacks sometimes and somehow touch something fundamental about life, in a way that no one else seems able to.

Let me offer one more funeral-based example, courtesy of Flannery O’Connor, the southern short story writer from the 1950s. O’Connor was very white, and strangely enough for a southerner, a Roman Catholic. You’d wonder how a Roman Catholic could touch the essence of the American South such as Faulkner could. And yet she did. Part of her charm was her Roman Catholicness and the odd contrast between her spirituality and the Baptist and Pentecostal spirit of those around her. But what really made her stories effective were blacks. Here’s a quick taste from “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead”, one of O’Connor’s typically weird plots about a teenage white boy who lived out in some southern tarshack with his uncle. The uncle dies one hot day, and the kid didn’t want to dig the hole to properly bury his uncle; instead he went to a still and got drunk. An old black man who happened along the way saw this and finished the internment. The man later confronted the drunken kid, saying: “This ain’t no way for you to act. Old man don’t deserve this … he was deep in this life, he was deep in Jesus’ misery.”

Am I saying that whites should uncritically embrace all that is “black”, including 50 Cent and other expressions of irresponsible sexuality and violence? No, I’m not. Probably more than 50% of blacks don’t embrace that stuff either. Am I saying that informed and concerned whites should practice a form of hyper-political correctness and never bring up statistics about continuing problems within the African-American culture, e.g. high rates of male incarceration and one-parent families despite much government assistance over the past 40 years? No, the truth must be dealt with. But I am promoting open-mindedness, and I am saying that my own open-mindedness to the African-American culture (which is very imperfect and late-blooming) has been mostly a good thing, something I’d heartily recommend to all my fellow Americans of European heritage (or any heritage, for that matter).