Camera Stellata
Needless to say, the author of this video and his views are somewhat questionable. Anyone on ED-P fancy a crack at the five benefit challenge though?
I'm always told it enriches us but I'm not sure what that means
The question presents a series of unquestioned assumptions. How do you define a benefit? The food and music thing seems to trivialize cultures to a few narrow manifestations. Why some homogeneity be the default? This whole melting pot malarkey is frankly fiction, and has no real historical grounding, given anti-miscegenation laws, rampant racism, placing American Indians onto reservations, and so forth. Americanization was just something made up by people around the turn of the century who didn't like European immigrants or existing cultural groups like Cajuns or the Pennsylvania Dutch speaking foreign languages
The melting pot was never about non-whites integrating into American society; it was about immigrant whites integrating into the dominant white society. See the point about American history being kind of racist. And, y'know, it also didn't work.
What are the benefits of the melting pot? How would we even define the culture that is supposed to be dominant?
If you want benefits, think about globalization, and how allowing people to maintain their culture encourages multilingual American children, a standard sadly lacking from our education system. Think about how it makes us question whether our society is really so exceptional. Or how strong ties to other countries encourages migrant labor, which is necessary to our entire agricultural system. Or how it creates a demand overseas for spots at our universities, which drives our technological development with an influx of motivated, diverse students from overseas, who have worked hard to qualify at our schools and to develop their language skills. How about the fact that America wouldn't exist without a diverse, multinational culture that brought modern ideas of government and religion out of all areas of continental Europe together in a new country, founded by the English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Germans, and no small amount of influence of Africans and American Indians.
I ask you, give me five benefits of homogeneity, of consistency, of being unexceptional. Because American culture, as it is today? Produced ******** Honey Boo Boo. Frankly, if the option is, let people keep doing what they're doing, or descending into American mediocrity, I know what I'd prefer.