Lu Hunyh, Victor

« Melting Pot » and Miscegenation - 2014.


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One has sometimes the tendency to merge the notion of Melting Pot, one of the foundation myths of the American Republic, with miscegenation, or tends to think that from the first one necessarily ensues the second. Melting Pot refers to the absorption of different populations of the world by the United-States. As of miscegenation, it implies the union of persons from different ethnical backgrounds, so that their descendants will constitute a brand new racial entity that is distinct from their parents’. This confusion is all the more problematic since part of the United-States’ history has been characterized by anti-miscegenation laws. The objective of those legislations was to reduce to a strict minimum the advent of mixed couples in order to prevent the arrival of biracial children, that the religious puritanism (which often translates into racial prejudice) of the white population could not tolerate. In that context, a dialectical process took place : Indeed, on the one hand, there is the attempt to contain racial mixtures through the multiplication of different legislations (making the mixtures taboo) and, on the other, there the promotion through the Melting Pot myth of a kind of harmony that transcends the differences among the different populations. Its synthesis would be communitarianism.