Stephen Steinberg, a professor at Queens University, and the winner of the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarshiphas written a column to say that the “Melting Pot” is working.

[Robert] Putnam’s findings have been seized upon by those on the political right who have been railing against immigrants and immigration policy. Last month, Patrick J. Buchanan wrote a piece for VDARE.Com under the title, “Robert Putnam: Diversity Is Our Destruction.” According to Buchanan, prior to 1965 when most immigrants came from Europe, “the Melting Pot worked.” However, he insists the situation is different today: “The numbers coming are huge, and they are coming from countries, cultures and civilizations whose peoples have never before been assimilated by any European nation. And they are arriving in an America whose Melting Pot is broken and whose elites lack the vision to see or the moral courage to confront the imminent peril.”[The melting pot is NOT broken San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 2007]

This concept doesn’t make Dr. Steinberg happy, [email him] and he attempts to refute it with the aid of

• a 1945 studyof assimilation
• a more recent study of New York area Hispanics who are giving their kids American first names like Ashley and Joshua
• the 1908 play The Melting Pot, which he may have actually read, since he quotes David Quixano’s speech at the end accurately.

I don’t consider any of this demolishes Pat’s thesis that Melting Pot no longer melts. This isn’t 1908, when the Immigration Restriction League was working to pass what eventually became the Immigration Act of 1924, leading to a massive pause in immigration.

It isn’t 1945, when that pause had been in effect for 20 years. It’s 2007, when Mexicans are immigrating in large enough numbers to take over whole towns, and can don’t have to learn English to function in society because there is enough of society that speaks Spanish in America that they can work, shop, and send their children to school in Spanish.

I assume the professor just wants the “Melting Pot” to be working, and is “railing” against Pat because he says it isn’t.

Anyhow, here’s my favorite quote from The Melting Pot, where the protagonist is arguing with his brother about the Melting Pot concept:

DAVID

A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians–into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.

MENDEL

I should have thought the American was made already–eighty millions of him.

Mychal Bell, the All-State football star at the center of the Jena Six brouhaha, was today sentenced to jail for 18 months for his four previous convictions. See, stomping an unconscious kid wasn’t part of his various probation deals that had allowed him to stay out of juvenile hall and on the football field for Jena H.S. in 2006:

‘Jena 6′ Teen Mychal Bell Back in Jail

The Associated Press

JENA, La. — A teenager at the center of a civil rights controversy was back in jail Thursday after a judge decided the fight that put him in the national spotlight violated terms of his probation for a previous conviction, his attorney said.

Mychal Bell, who along with five other black teenagers is accused of beating a white classmate, had gone to juvenile court Thursday expecting another routine hearing, said Carol Powell Lexing, one of Bell’s attorneys.

Instead, after a six-hour hearing, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. sentenced him to 18 months in jail on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

He had been hit with those charges before the Dec. 4 attack on classmate Justin Barker. Details on the previous charges, which were handled in juvenile court, were unclear.

We know that in one of those earlier “adjudications” (juvenile justicese for “convictions”) the 5′-10″, 185 pound fullback /middle linebacker (100 yards rushing and 12 tackles per game as a junior) who was being recruited by mighty LSU, was found guilty of punching a 17 year old girl in the face.

Is anybody other than the original small town reporter Abbey Brown and sportswriter Jason Whitlock ever going to realize that this isn’t a story about poor oppressed sharecroppers getting lynched, it’s a story about football stars who were coddled for years, until they finally went too far, because small towns in the South are crazy about high school football?