by Steven Macpherson

Created on: February 04, 2009   Last Updated: February 28, 2009

This question has no simple yes or no answers. Historically African Americans were forced to live a lifestyle conducive to the development of a separatist ideology. Slavery and discrimination are identity distorters at their best and identity destroyers at their worst. To counteract such destructive influences African Americans have developed proactive cultural responses that have safe guarded their identity as a distinct people.

African Americans are not simply just another visible minority living in America, they are a distinct society and possibly a burgeoning nation within a nation. It is important to understand what the term separatism means in relation to such other terms as integration, equality, and inclusiveness. The issues of separatism are not resolved by the achievement of civil rights, social integration, equal opportunity or even the election of an African-American president.

White Americans remain the majority among whom minorities live. To be idealistically inclusive for a white American is a choice from an empowered position. White Americans are by definition separatist, regardless of their ideology. White or perhaps better put European-American culture remains dominant and sets the standard in terms of what it means to be American for the vast majority of Americans. The American philosophical bent towards the inclusiveness of immigrants and racial minorities has traditionally been a "melting pot".

A melting pot view of cultural integration generally means that such issues as race, culture, language and ethnicity, overtime, become dissolved in the bigger cauldron of what it means to be American. I believe that this traditional melting-pot approach is gradually giving way to the reality of multiculturalism within America. Multiculturalism strives towards the creation of a mosaic rather than a melting-pot interpretation of national identity. Multiculturalism embraces the struggles of ethnic minorities for identity within the nation as the very essence of what national identity is. Such a view is much more fluid than static. The national mosaic is perceived as an evolving process rather than a bubbling cauldron full of "toil and trouble". The strength of American republicanism is measured not so much by its power to strip its citizens of their former cultural identities as it is its capacity for inclusiveness. Inclusiveness does not impinge upon identity so much as it allows identities to emerge as important contributors to the collective whole of

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