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The Hyphen and the Melting Pot Multiculturalism promised diversity, but by weakening assimilation and shared identity, it risks unraveling the cultural bonds that made America one nation.By Roger Kimball | RUTHFULLY YOURS.The Hyphen and the Melting Pot Multiculturalism promised diversity, but by weakening assimilation and shared identity, it risks unraveling the cultural bonds that made America one nation.By Roger Kimball https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/07/the-hyphen-and-the-melting-pot/ What is your favorite bit of Orwellian Newspeak?Near the top of my list is “affirmative action.” It’s such an emollient phrase, so redolent of cheeriness (savor the word “affirmative”) and practicality (“action”).What it really means is “discrimination on the basis of sex, skin color, or some other item in the contemporary lexicon of victimology.” But you can—almost—forget that while the pleasing phrase “affirmative action” echoes in your recollection.Given the efforts of the Trump administration to end that bureaucratic hypostasis of affirmative action that travels under the acronym “DEI,” I thought I would take a moment to step back and reflect on the phenomenon of “affirmative action” and its ideological comrade in arms, multiculturalism.A favorite weapon in the armory of multiculturalism is the lowly hyphen.When we speak of an African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American these days, the aim is not descriptive but deconstructive.There is a polemical edge to it, a provocation.The hyphen does not mean “American, but hailing at some point in the past from someplace else.” It means “only provisionally American: my allegiance is divided at best.” (I believe something similar can be said about the feminist fad for hyphenating the bride’s maiden name with her husband’s surname.It is a gesture of independence that is also a declaration of divided loyalty.) It is curious to what extent the passion for hyphenation is fostered more by the liberal elite than the populations it is supposedly meant to serve.How does it serve them?Presumably by enhancing their sense of “self-esteem.” Frederick Douglass saw through this charade some one hundred and seventy years ago.“No one idea,” he wrote, “has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward colored people of this country than that which makes Africa, not America, their home.” The multicultural passion for hyphenation is not simply a fondness for syntactical novelty.It also bespeaks a commitment to the centrifugal force of anti-American tribalism.“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin,” Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, “would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.” He then warned against the destructive vogue for “hyphenated Americans.” The division marked by the hyphen in African-American (say) denotes a political stand.It goes hand-in-hand with other items on the index of liberal desiderata—the redistributive impulse behind efforts at “affirmative action,” for example.Affirmative action was undertaken in the name of equality.But, as always seems to happen, it soon fell prey to the Orwellian logic from which the principle that “all animals are equal” gives birth to the transformative codicil: “but some animals are more equal than others.” Affirmative action is Orwellian in a linguistic sense, too, since what announces itself as an initiative to promote equality winds up enforcing discrimination precisely on the grounds that it was meant to overcome.Thus we are treated to the delicious, if alarming, contradiction of college applications that declare their commitment to evaluate candidates “without regard to race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or national origin” on page 1 and then helpfully inform you on page 2 that it is to your advantage to mention if you belong to any of the following designated victim groups.Among other things, a commitment to multiculturalism seems to dull one’s sense of contradiction.The whole history of affirmative action is instinct with that irony.The original effort to redress legitimate grievances—grievances embodied, for instance, in the discriminatory practices of Jim Crow—has mutated into new forms of discrimination.In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee because blacks were openly barred from war factory jobs.But what then began as a presidential executive order under JFK in 1961, directing government contractors to take “affirmative action” to assure that people be hired “without regard” for sex, race, creed, color, and so on, has resulted in the creation of vast bureaucracies dedicated to discovering, hiring, and advancing people chiefly on the basis of those qualities.White is black, freedom is slavery, and “without regard” comes to mean “with regard for nothing else.” Had he lived to see the evolution of affirmative action, Alex de Tocqueville would have put such developments down as examples of how in democratic societies the passion for equality tends to trump the passion for liberty.The fact that the effort to enforce equality often results in egregious inequalities he would have understood to be part of the “tutelary despotism” that “extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd.” Multiculturalism and “affirmative action” are allies in the assault on the institution of American identity.As such, they oppose the traditional understanding of what it means to be an American—an understanding hinted at in 1782 by the French-born American farmer J.Hector St.John de Crèvecoeur in his famous image of America as a country in which “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” This crucible of American identity, this “melting pot,” has two aspects.The negative aspect involves disassociating oneself from the cultural imperatives of one’s country of origin.One sheds a previous identity before assuming a new one.One might preserve certain local habits and tastes, but they are essentially window-dressing.In essence, one has left the past behind in order to become an American citizen.The positive aspect of advancing the melting pot involves embracing the substance of American culture.The 1795 code for citizenship lays out some of the formal requirements.I do solemnly swear (1) to support the Constitution of the United States; (2) to renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which the applicant was before a subject or citizen; (3) to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (4) to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (5) (A) to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law, or (B) to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by law .For over two hundred years, this oath had been required of those wishing to become citizens.In 2003, Samuel Huntington tells us in his book Who We Are, federal bureaucrats launched a campaign to rewrite and weaken it.I shall say more about what constitutes the substance of American identity in a moment.For now, I want to underscore the fact that this project of Americanization has been an abiding concern since the time of the Founders.“We must see our people more Americanized,” John Jay declared in the 1780s.Jefferson concurred.Teddy Roosevelt repeatedly championed the idea that American culture, the “crucible in which all the new types are melted into one,” was “shaped from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men of Washington’s day.” It is often said that America is a nation of immigrants.In fact, as Huntington points out, America is a country that was initially a country of settlers.Settlers precede immigrants and make their immigration possible.The culture of those mostly English-speaking, predominantly Anglo-Protestant settlers defined America