New York City A Melting Pot Analysis

America is a country born from immigrants; most citizens can trace their origins back to ancestors who came to America as immigrants. Throughout America there are cities that are so diverse in culture; it is hard to believe that we are one nation. An example of this would be New York City. New York City was an original entry point for many European immigrants and has more than eight hundred languages being spoken in the city. (CNBC) There is such a diverse range of people in New York City that one could lose themselves by turning the wrong corner and end up being in a place like Chinatown, where they still wouldn’t believe that they are in America. New York City has been referred to as a “melting pot” of different cultures. Kwame Appiah, a philosopher and writer, states in his work, “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers” that, “Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.” (Appiah 59) What Appiah is saying is that because everyone and every culture are different, we shouldn’t shun those differences but rather accept them and try to understand
There are the possibilities that the “melting pot” ideal will not work and that cultures would simply become exploited for monetary gains. Leslie Savan, a three time Pulitzer Prize finalist, talks about a kind of cultural borrowing and some cultural exploitation in her work “What’s Black, Then White, and Said All Over?” Savan examines black vernacular and the impact it has on America, while also talking about how terms from black vernacular are being used by the media. Savan uses the commercial from Anheuser-Busch beers as an example of these terms being exploited for money. In the commercial, they used the phrase