Updates of USAMeltingpot

(Unabridged Scripts of the talk to Troy City Council on October 21, 2013)

Part I.

Good evening, council members and fellow citizens.

First, I want to thank you all for giving me this opportunity to introduce our club, USA Melting Pot. It is also my great honor to be here tonight to represent all our key club members, whether they are here or not. They are the ones that have been contributing tremendously to make our club happen and on the right path.

USA Melting Pot is neutral on politics and religion. The primary objective of the club is to build bridges between all ethnic groups. As we see more and more foreign born immigrants in Metro Detroit area, we would like to encourage people to mingle with each other and share their stories with each other. The secondary purpose is to celebrate all cultural backgrounds, including American culture. So we can break barriers between people, understand each other better, and enrich our community.

The philosophy behind our club is different from the original melting pot idea and multi-culturalism commonly seen today. The original idea of melting pot was to have people deliberately lose their ethnic identities, and become homogeneous in American culture, while the multi-culturalism is to celebrate separate ethnic identities without mingling, which can be seen as salad bowl, i.e., all gradients in one space but with no interaction. Different from both above, we are promoting a new philosophy in between: we encourage people to celebrate their ethnic heritages, in the mean time we treat people equally regardless of their origin, cultural background or even religious view. In other words, we want our ever-diversifying community to be shaken up as the oil & water dressing in one salad bowl, and each one can enjoy all the flavors.

(Continued ...)