Coming to America Exhibition

The land of opportunity. The American dream. The melting pot.  For tens of millions of people, these have not been mere cliches but rather the hope and the reality of coming to America. Even though immigrants have faced prejudice and often suffered bitter disappointment, America, and the United States, in particular, has been and continues to be a place where people have wanted to come to start new lives, and that has been one of this nation's best strengths.

And yet, the role of race in immigration has been a very complex one. The melting pot can be cruel, on the one hand, it promises inclusion and acceptance, with a shot at that American dream: on the other, it may demand that immigrants shed their previous cultural identity and assimilate to an identity overwhelmingly white, and white of a particular kind: Protestant, northern European. 

Who can adapt to this conception of whiteness? It was a struggle for the Irish Catholics, and also for many southern and eastern Europeans - Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Jews, and many other ethnicities--whose cultural habits, languages, and even skin tones did always not fit the Anglo-Saxon model of whiteness.

And what of those groups who could never fully assimilate to the dominant model whiteness, due to the manifest differentness of their skin color or other physical features--Asians and Africans, for example? What has been their story in finding a place in America? And is America changing? Can we dare hope yet for an American dream that does not make whiteness its passkey for complete inclusion?