The New Americans

"Barone shows that the biggest mistake we can make is to act as if we are at a wholly new place in history; "America in the future will be multiracial and multiethnic, but it will not - or should not - be multicultural in the sense of containing ethnic communities marked off from and adversarial to the larger society, any more than today's America consists of unassimilated and adversarial communities of Irish, Italians, or Jews." He also refutes the notion that the situation today is different because today's minorities are of different races; as he points out, "a hundred years ago the Irish, Italians, and Jews were considered to be other races" as well."