There is tremendous ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity throughout the United States, largely  resulting from a long history and ongoing identification as a “nation of immigrants” that attracted millions of newcomers from every continent. Still, elected officials and residents ardently disagree about  how the United States should approach this diversity and incorporate immigrant, ethnic, and cultural  minority groups into the larger framework of American society. The fundamental question is whether  cultural minority groups should be encouraged to forego their ethnic and cultural identities and acculturate to the values, traditions, and customs of mainstream culture or should be allowed and encouraged to retain key elements of their identities and heritages. This is a highly emotional question. Matters of cultural identity are often deeply personal and associated with strongly held beliefs about the defining features of their countries’ national identities. Over the past 400 years, three distinct social philosophies have developed from efforts to promote national unity and tranquility in societies that have  experienced large-scale immigration: assimilation, multiculturalism, and amalgamation.

Assimilation encourages and may even demand that members of ethnic and immigrant minority  groups abandon their native customs, traditions, languages, and identities as quickly as possible and  adopt those of mainstream society—“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Advocates of assimilation  generally view a strong sense of national unity based on a shared linguistic and cultural heritage as the  best way to promote a strong national identity and avoid ethnic conflict. They point, for example, to  ethnic warfare and genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s and to recent independence movements by French Canadians in Quebec and in Scotland as evidence of negative consequences of groups retaining a strong sense of loyalty and identification with their ethnic or linguistic  communities. The “English as the Official Language” movement in the United States is another example. People are concerned that U.S. unity is weakened by immigrants who do not learn to speak English.  In recent years, the U.S. Census Bureau has identified more than 300 languages spoken in the United  States. In 2010, more than 60 million people representing 21 percent of the total U.S. population spoke a language other than English at home and 38 million of those people spoke Spanish.

Multiculturalism takes a different view of assimilation, arguing that ethnic and cultural diversity is a positive quality that enriches a society and encourages respect for cultural differences. The basic  belief behind multiculturalism is that group differences, in and of themselves, do not spark tension, and  society should promote tolerance for differences rather than urging members of immigrant, ethnic, and  cultural minority groups to shed their customs and identities. Vivid examples of multiculturalism can  be seen in major cities across the United States, such as New York, where ethnic neighborhoods such  as Chinatown and Little Italy border one another, and Los Angeles, which features many diverse neighborhoods, including Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Filipinotown, Little Armenia, and Little Ethiopia. The  ultimate objective of multiculturalism is to promote peaceful coexistence while allowing each ethnic  community to preserve its unique heritage and identity. Multiculturalism is the official governmental  policy of Canada; it was codified in 1988 under the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, which declares that  “multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society and acknowledges the  freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve, enhance, and share their cultural heritage.”^[1]

Amalgamation promotes hybridization of diverse cultural groups in a multiethnic society. Members of distinct ethnic and cultural groups freely intermingle, interact, and live among one another with cultural exchanges and, ultimately, inter-ethnic dating and intermarriage occurring as the social and cultural barriers between groups fade over time. Amalgamation is similar to assimilation in that a strong,  unified national culture is viewed as the desired end result but differs because it represents a more thorough “melting pot” that blends the various groups in a society (the dominant/mainstream group and  minority groups) into a new hybridized cultural identity rather than expecting minority groups to conform to the majority’s standards.

Debate is ongoing among sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and political pundits regarding the  relative merits of each approach and which, if any, most accurately describes the United States. It is a  complex and often contentious question because people may confuse their personal ideologies (what  they think the United States should strive for) with social reality (what actually occurs). Furthermore,  the United States is a large, complex country geographically that is comprised of large urban centers  with millions of residents, moderately populated areas characterized by small towns, and mostly rural  communities with only several hundred or a few thousand inhabitants. The nature of social and cultural  life varies significantly with the setting in which it occurs.

9.7.1 Anthropology Meets Popular Culture: Sports, Race/Ethnicity and Diversity

Throughout this chapter, we have stated that the concept of race is a socially constructed idea and  explained why biologically distinct human races do not exist. Still, many in the United States cling to  a belief in the existence of biological racial groups (regardless of their racial and ethnic backgrounds).  Historically, the nature of popular sports in the United States has been offered as “proof” of biological  differences between races in terms of natural athletic skills and abilities. In this regard, the world of  sports has served as an important social institution in which notions of biological racial differences  become reified—mistakenly assumed as objective, real, and factual. Specifically, many Americans have  noted the large numbers of African Americans in Olympic sprinting, the National Football League  (NFL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) and interpreted their disproportionate number  as perceived “evidence” or “proof” that Blacks have unique genes, muscles, bone structures, and/or  other biological qualities that make them superior athletes relative to people from other racial backgrounds—that they are “naturally gifted” runners and jumpers and thus predominate in sports.

This topic sparked intense media attention in 2012 during the lead-up to that year’s Olympics in London. Michael Johnson, a retired African American track star who won gold medals at the 1992, 1996,  and 2000 Summer Olympic Games, declared that Black Americans and West Indians (of Jamaican,  Trinidadian, Barbadian, and other Caribbean descent) dominated international sprinting competitions  because they possessed a “superior athletic gene” that resulted from slavery: “All my life, I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it’s impossible to think that being descended  from slaves hasn’t left an imprint through the generations . . . slavery has benefited descendants like me.  I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.”^[2] Others have previously expressed similar ideas, such as  writer John Entine, who suggested in his book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re  Afraid to Talk About It (2000), that the brutal nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and harsh conditions  of slavery in the Americas produced slaves who could move faster and who had stronger, more durable  bodies than the general population and that those supposedly hardier bodies persisted in today’s African  Americans and Afro-Caribbeans, giving them important athletic advantages over others. In a similar vein, former CBS sportscaster Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder claimed, on the eve of Super Bowl XXII in  1988, that African Americans comprised the majority of NFL players because they were “bred that way”  during slavery as a form of selective breeding between bigger and stronger slaves much like had been  done with racehorses. Snyder was fired from CBS shortly after amid a tidal wave of controversy and  furor. Racial stereotypes regarding perceptions of innate differences in athletic ability were a major  theme in the 1992 comedy film White Men Can’t Jump, which starred Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as an inter-racial pair of basketball street hustlers.

Despite such beliefs, even among people who otherwise do not harbor racist sentiments, the notion of innate Black athletic supremacy is obviously misguided, fallacious, and self-contradictory when we  examine the demographic composition of the full range of sports in the United States rather than focusing solely on a few extremely popular sports that pay high salaries and have long served as inspiration for upward mobility and fame in a society in which educational and employment opportunities for  lower-income and impoverished minority groups (often concentrated in inner-city communities) have  rarely been equivalent to those of middle-class and affluent “whites” living in small towns and suburban communities. Take the myth that Blacks have an innately superior jumping ability. The idea that  “white men can’t jump” stems from the relatively small number of white American players in the NBA  and has been reified by the fact that only one “white” player (Brent Barry of the Los Angeles Clippers in  1996) has ever won the NBA’s annual slam-dunk contest. However, the stereotype would be completely  inverted if we look at the demographic composition and results of high jump competitions. The high  jump is arguably a better gauge of leaping ability than a slam-dunk contest since it requires raising the  entire body over a horizontal bar and prohibits extension of the arms overhead, thus diminishing any  potential advantage from height. For decades, both the men’s and the women’s international high jump  competitions have been dominated by white athletes from the United States and Europe. Yet no one  attributes their success to “white racial genes.” American society does not have a generational history of  viewing people who are socially identified as “white” in terms of body type and physical prowess as it  does with African Americans.

The same dynamic is at play if we compare basketball with volleyball. Both sports require similar sets  of skills, namely, jumping, speed, agility, endurance, and outstanding hand-eye coordination. Nevertheless, beach volleyball has tended to be dominated by “white” athletes from the United States, Canada,  Australia, and Europe while indoor volleyball is more “racially balanced” (if we assume that biological  human races actually exist) since the powerhouse indoor volleyball nations are the United States, China,  Japan, Brazil, Cuba, and Russia.

Thus, a variety of factors, including cultural affinities and preferences, social access and opportunities, existence of a societal infrastructure that supports youth participation and development in particular sports, and the degree of prestige assigned to various sports by nations, cultures, and ethnic  communities, all play significant roles in influencing the concentration of social and/or ethnic groups  in particular sports. It is not a matter of individual or group skills or talents; important socio-economic  dimensions shape who participates in a sport and who excels. Think about a sport in which you have  participated or have followed closely. What social dynamics do you associate with that sport in terms of  the gender, race/ethnicity, and social class of the athletes who predominate in it?

For additional insight into the important role that social dynamics play in shaping the racial/ethnic,  social class, and cultural dimensions of athletes, let us briefly consider three sports: basketball, boxing,  and football.

9.7.2 Basketball

While basketball is a national sport played throughout the United States, it also has long been associated with urban/inner-city environments, and many professional American basketball players have come from working class and lower-income backgrounds. This trend dates to the 1930s, when  Jewish players and teams dominated professional basketball in the United States. That dominance was commonly explained by the media in terms of the alleged “scheming,” “flashiness,” and “artful dodging”  nature of the “Jewish culture.” In other words, Jews were believed to have a fundamental talent for hoops  that explained their over-representation in the sport. In reality, most Jewish immigrants in the early  twentieth century lived in working class, urban neighborhoods such as New York City, Philadelphia,  and Chicago where basketball was a popular sport in the local social fabric of working-class communities.34

By 1992, approximately 90 percent of NBA players were African American, and the league’s demographics once again fueled rumors that a racial/ethnic group was “naturally gifted” in basketball. However, within ten short years, foreign-born players largely from Eastern European nations such as  Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey accounted for nearly  20 percent of the starting line-ups of NBA teams. The first player selected in the 2002 NBA draft was  seven-foot six-inch center Yao Ming, a native of Shanghai, China, and by the early 2000s, the United  States had lost some of its traditional dominance of international basketball as several nations began to  catch up because of the tremendous globalization of basketball’s popularity.

9.7.3 Boxing

Like basketball, boxing has been an urban sport popular among working-class ethnic groups. During  the early twentieth century, both amateur and professional boxing in the United States were dominated  by European immigrant groups, particularly the Irish, Italians, and Jewish Americans. As with basketball, which inspired the “hoop dreams” of inner-city youths to escape poverty by reaching the professional ranks, boxing provided sons of lower-income European immigrants with dreams of upward  mobility, fame, and fortune. In fact, it was one of the few American sports that thrived during the Great  Depression, attracting a wave of impoverished young people who saw pugilism as a ticket to financial  security. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, intra-European ethnic rivalries (Irish vs.  Italian, Italian vs. Jewish) were common in U.S. boxing; fighters were seen as quasi-ambassadors of their  respective neighborhoods and ethnic communities.

The demographic composition of boxers began to change in the latter half of the twentieth century  when formerly stigmatized and racialized Eastern European immigrant groups began to be perceived  simply as “white” and mainstream. They attained middle-class status and relocated to the newly established suburbs, and boxing underwent a profound racial and ethnic transition. New urban minority  groups—African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican Americans who moved into inner-city neighborhoods vacated by Europeans began to dominate boxing.

9.7.4 Football

Finally, consider football, which has surpassed baseball as the most popular spectator sport in the  United States and is popular with all social classes, races/ethnicities, and regions. Collegiate and professional football rosters are also undergoing a demographic change; a growing number of current  National College Athletic Association and NFL players were born outside the mainland United States.  Since the 1980s, many athletes from American Samoa, a U.S. territory in the South Pacific, have joined  U.S. football teams. A boy in American Samoa is an astounding 56 times more likely to make the NFL  than a boy born and raised on the U.S. mainland!^[3] American Samoa’s rapid transformation into a grid iron powerhouse is the result of several inter-related factors that dramatically increased the appeal of  the sport across the tiny island, including the cultural influence of American missionaries who introduced football. Expanding migration of Samoans to Hawaii and California in recent decades has also  fostered their interest in football, which has trickled back to the South Pacific, and the NFL is working  to expand the popularity of football in American Samoa.^[4] Similarly, Major League Baseball has been  promoting baseball in the Dominican Republic, Korea, and Japan in recent years.