Right there with ya bud . 6 years has flown by . <| sep |> The Great Melting Pot of America is actually not . I ' ve heard it more referred to as a Salad Bowl and I think that ' s more accurate . The whole idea of American is historically even a bit of a fabrication , we ' ve not honestly ever had a strong , unified culture or national identity except during war times when they wanted us to feel like we had one . With so many people who ' ve either been here since prehistory , some who came on a boat for freedom , some came on a boat in chains , some came later for opportunity , some came later to escape . there is and has always been a lack of deep , historic , unifying ties between different pockets of people . Even different regions in the earlier days developed distinctly different cultures if you look at say , the 19 th century Northeast , South and South West . Look at a map of Chicago broken down by racial makeup of the neighborhoods . Look at a map of any state or county based on income . While by statistics we have people here of literally every nationality , every religion , every possible belief system and every income level , they ' re not integrated with each other and don ' t have to be because there is enough of everything , people clump together in pockets of people like themselves . sometimes by choice , sometimes not . So all this massively diverse population is here . but not necessarily interacting with each other . I mean hell , I ' m a shining example of it to be truthful . I live in a town that ' s about 40401010 race distribution wise White , Black , HispanicLatino , AsianSouth Asian , my high school was about 405055 and I live in a very middle income neighborhood just on the edge of where it starts getting sketchy which as a population approximately the same as the town in general . But . There is a strong racial segregation line if you look at a population map . Crime drugs and unemployment are a lot worse on the other side of the line than I ' m on however they ' re pretty bad in the next town over which is predominantly white but low income just like a lot of other postindustrial midwest rust belt towns . But at work . We have 2 nonwhite employees in the company . My customers ? 99 % white . My combined family ? 100 %. My circle of friends ? 95 % Same as me . So in my life , despite being surrounded by a lot of people not like me . my life has ended up as if its like they ' re not even there . So in a situation like that , its really easy to feel like , despite people living right where you do , you still have no connection to them . I ' ll come right out and admit that if it weren ' t for some really cool Black kids on my street growing up and in High School plus my current neighbors on both sides who have been nothing but fantastic I could have easily grown up to be a bigot . If you know nothing but what the headlines tell you , it ' d be pretty easy because good people never make headlines . I ' d probably be more wary of Muslims if not for my friends family , who came over from Africa 30 years ago , weren ' t the warmest welcoming and absolutely nicest people I ' ve ever met in my entire life . It ' d be easy to think a lot of hispanic people were just welfare seeking border jumpers if I ' d only listened to headlines and never worked with a handful of Mexican guys over the years who were not only absolutely hilarious but busted their asses every day and had probably some of the closest , tightest families I ' ve ever met . I ' m pretty hesitant to be worried about folks from a Middle East background but my Grandpas ' side of the family came over to the states in the late 1800 s from a territory that used to be part of Syria . I ' ve pretty much walked away from Religion but in the early 2000 ' s the Defense of Marrige act seemed reasonable to me until around the same time I stopped believing I also met my Lesbian neighbors who were cool as shit and I realized why the hell do I have any right to keep them from getting married . Sorry for the ramble . I guess the TLDR of this mess is that despite the US being a gigantic diverse country many of us are in little pockets of people only like ourselves so its easy to see people very near you still as outsiders