Learning from the Margins: An Examination of the "Melting Pot"

Fall 1980.

I am eight years old.

I am a couple of months into second grade at my elementary school in the Bay Area, California.

After one year of US schooling, I have the remnants of a South African accent that my American teachers and friends find endearing and a constant reminder that I am an “exotic other” in their community. Some ask me if there are lions roaming the streets of Johannesburg, but despite their lack of global context, I feel welcomed and included and safe as I navigate the new customs and culture around me.

I am introduced that fall to all the trapping of a well-funded California, public elementary school classroom. (At that point Californians had only just passed Proposition 13, and ample funding until that time had sustained a well-funded, albeit de facto highly segregated, public education system.) There are paper trees with paper apples on the wall. Each apple has a current student’s name written on it. I can read them all easily, and there are none I don’t recognize, despite my recent arrival from sub-Saharan Africa. And my name, Stacey (with an “e”), is familiar, if not common, for them. During social studies time we make pilgrim hats and headbands with feathers to represent the colonizers and indigenous communities that supposedly shared an auspicious and harmonious meal that gave thanks for the harvest that year. They are pinned to the wall, making a colorful border above the apple trees.

I wonder then, as I have wondered innumerable times since, why did the Native Americans show up for a feast? Why did the colonizers show up, for that matter? Hadn’t there been massacres and battles with winners and losers? What was communication like and what drove curiosity versus fear? The narrative fed to me by my teachers that year (and in subsequent years) was simple, gratifying, and it conveyed a sense of peace. But I wondered then, and I wonder now: peace to what end and for whom?

Sitting in that second-grade classroom, I think again about my name on the tree. My “e.”

Subconsciously I understood then that my difference was a perk. It made me interesting to them -- not threatening in any way. No one seemed afraid of me. I was invited to the table, literally. Connecting the dots to my musings about the first Thanksgiving, I remember wondering if it was it the ease with which we could communicate that made me welcome?

No, it was my whiteness. My acceptance by the group was that simple. I knew that then; I understand it even more deeply now.

Understanding the power of race and socialization, omnipresent in my mind having been nurtured from birth in South Africa, a transparently racialized space, I understood at 8-years old what many of the white adults around me didn’t. I was just different enough to be interesting but not different enough to be threatening to the color-negating* culture around me.

In 1980, I am taught that the first Thanksgiving feast is a time of great joy for all who participated in it, and that seems very special to me having recently emigrated from apartheid South Africa where my parents raised me to understand that apartheid was wrong and something to be challenged.

We have a social studies textbook. It has defined vocabulary words and key concepts in the margins, directing me to pay attention to the most important ideas and the words I need to convey them. I read “melting pot” in boldface type. America is a melting pot. I am a strong learner and also very good at retaining narratives I am supposed to parrot. For the first time my capacity to learn and my capacity to parrot is at odds. I look over at the passage I have just read to add nuance and depth to my understanding of “melting pot.” My understanding is enhanced by a juxtaposition the textbook writers have presented: a salad bowl with a lettuce leaf and a tomato wedge peeking out over its edge sits in contrast to a fondue pot, each fondue fork just like the next, with its prongs buried in the cheesy ooze within it.

I can see the images just as clearly on the page 40 years later. America is a melting pot, not a salad bowl.

The multiple choice test we take soon after reading that passage asks me if America is A) a melting pot, or B) a salad bowl, or C) all of the above. I remember picturing the boldface print on the side of the page: America is a melting pot. I remember looking up at the pilgrim hats and headbands and wondering if the textbook got it wrong; surely Thanksgiving would not have been very interesting if America were a melting pot. And, surely no one around me thinks that it has become a melting pot? I’ve only been here 15 months, and I can already sense the “othering,” however innocuous, through my own lived experience as an immigrant. And, I don’t want to melt in. I’ll be a tomato for the rest of my life, but I am not interested in losing my heritage and difference.

And so, I decide to take on the system with my eyes wide open, knowing full well the “correct” answer is the one that was in boldface in the margin of my textbook page. Despite that, I circle “B”. America is a salad bowl.

I was tempted to hedge my bets and go for “C,” maybe we can be both? A little salad bowl with some fondue on the side? Sometimes it’s easier just to be a parrot.

But, even at eight, and perhaps because of my early years spent in a transparently racist system, I am not buying the color-negating, race-negating, difference-negating, deficit-based model of society. I am “other,” and I am proud of that. I will not be in that melting pot, and neither should the headband wearers whose histories, perspectives, and traditions have been subsumed in the colonizers' narratives of the “birth of a nation.” I will not melt in and lose all of me into a miasma of assimilation, which at best is comfortably banal, but more often than not violently traumatic.

With the fresh set of eyes through which I suddenly see and understand the parroting I have been doing, I am determined to learn beyond the narrative and into the counter narratives.

I get “B” wrong. I go up to my teacher’s desk after she hands back the test to fight my case. She, like all good soldiers maintaining the dominant narrative, gently shows me how I can get answers correct in the future. I must parrot back the boldface words. But, I am ready for her: My reality is a salad bowl, I tell her. I will always be an individual, like a tomato, in that bowl, sharing space. I think America is the salad bowl.

I walk back to my seat. I had been polite in my retort. She is quiet. There is no correction to my score. To this day, I remain proud of my “mistake.” I remain proud of my commitment to the salad bowl.

I am reminded of that moment every time I’ve told a client or a colleague that the system is not designed for us to see one another’s assets. When metrics of success are developed upon the premise of parroting and assimilation, everyone loses.

The veneer of “oneness and melting goodness” is a negation of the lived histories of millions. Adherence to a dominant narrative stifles the power of difference and deprives us all of exposure to the perspectives, creative insights, talents, and wisdom of those whose present day existence has been shaped by counter narratives, until now relegated to and silenced in the margins.

Today, I wonder how to reclaim the margins. What does it mean to be in the margins and from the margins?

I am struck by the power of the boldface word in the margins in my 1980s textbook, and I realize now that the margins are still, perhaps, the most important learning spaces for all of us. However, in my 2021 textbook, the margins are owned by everyone, not the textbook editors. And, the very best learners and textbook editors (the futurists who understand that to save ourselves we must find value in difference) ask others to write in their books and fill up the margins for them.

*I am choosing to use the term color-negating in lieu of colorblind. I began doing this once I realized that the term colorblind sustains a narrative of disempowerment for people identifying as vision-impaired and blind.