Abstract
In 1969, a newly formed British pop group, Blue Mink, released a single titled ‘Melting Pot’. The song reached number three in the British charts, but a cover version released in the United States, also in 1969, failed to impress North American listeners. Perhaps the song’s call for a global melting pot, in which all the races of the world would be stirred up, and then poured out as ‘coffee coloured people by the score’, was too unsettling for a nation where just one year previously the leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, Dr Martin Luther King, had been assassinated by a white man. The race riots which followed King’s death certainly rendered the song’s injunction to ‘take a pinch of white man, wrap it up in black skin’ disturbing, if not dangerous, at a time when the US melting pot was on the boil. Listening to ‘Melting Pot’ today, however, is a slightly embarrassing experience. Not because its vision of a melting pot ‘big enough to take the world and all it’s got’ seems naïve but because the song calls for harmony and unity among all the world’s peoples, while at the same time labelling these peoples as, for example, ‘curly Latin kinkies’, ‘Red Indian boys’ and ‘yellow Chinkies’. To contemporary ears, Melting Pot is racist, even if it is set to a happy, infectious melody.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Identity and Belonging |
Editors | Kate E. Huppatz, Mary Hawkins, Amie Matthews |
Place of Publication | U.K. |
Publisher | Palgrave |
Pages | 11-25 |
Number of pages | 15 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781137334923 |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |
Keywords
- Blue Mink (musical group)
- ethnicity
- racism