Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?

I found the class discussion of whether melting pot or salad bowl was a better way of describing our society's ethnic make up interesting. Personally I prefer the salad bowl over the melting pot. The melting pot idea seems to be more of bringing all the ethnic backgrounds together and creating a brand new culture in which we cannot trace any of the different ethnicities that make up this culture. In the salad bowl metaphor all of the different ethnic backgrounds are brought together, however we are still able to see unique characterstics of each of the ethnicities that make up the society. I feel this is a better description of the United States because today many citizens' -that make up the population of the United States population- ethnic background is still recognizable.

Ashley Allen,Post 5