How can a grown man covet attention so much as to publicly make such asinine comments.

Jindal is indeed wrong to play the social scientist and deprecate the hyphenated aspect of us Americans. Imagine him telling our Nehru to drop Hinduism and get with the program and be a Christian. Also drop the rum and drink the lager we English drink.....

But he never said that minorities are the cause of racism........PRINCE!!!!!

Prince loves doing this.  Let's burn him at the stake or banish this prince for heresy.   

Kari you do know that the Melting Pot meant that your name had to change to Alfred Brown and not what ever Muslim name that you might have had.

It was premised on the notion that non Anglo Saxon immigrants had to transform themselves into Anglo Americans.

One of the victories of the 60s was not just the removal of legal barriers of race, and a discussion about how informal barriers could be reduced, but the development of the notion that there are many different ways to be an American.

Sadly Bobby Jindal disagrees with this.  So yes, in a round about way he is castigating those who do not conform to Anglo Saxon norms.  He is tacitly giving the mainstream the right to exclude these people, in other words practise discrimination against them.  While this might not be his intent, this will be how these statements are used.

And as to the notion of immigrants and language.  You live in NYC.  How many Hispanics do you see (apart from recently arrived Mexicans) under 30 y/o who do not speak English as a primary language. Some variety of AMERICAN english that is.  Again the right wing extremists foster this notion of NON WHITE immigrants refusing to learn English.  And yet up to not that long ago NYC was full of neighborhoods with Yiddish and Italian, and this two generations after the Ellis Island era migration period ended.

I was of the impression that the USA (and Canada, and maybe Australia) were proud of their immigrant roots and didnt not attempt to force minority groups (white and non whote) into  a singular box. 

Jindal prefers France where French people of Antillean, North and West African, Mediteranean and Eastern European and Middle Eastern origins, are taught to see themselves as Gallic. And if they refuse to accept this, they are damned as refusing to assimilate.  Needless to say that France has encountered far more failure in fostering upward mobility amongst its immigrant groups, with even Euro groups like the Portuguese encountering difficulties. 

The notion that one can be  French but be from diverse entities is alien to France.  Despite the reality that France, like most countries with large immigrant populations, is being transformed as both the native and foreign born populations change each other, with every daily encounter.  To its credit the USA acknowledges this, though right wing extremists (and their stooges like Jindal) try to block this.

I will bring it to a level that might be more relevant to you.  Whether you wish to admit this or not, the root culture of Guyana (and the rest of the English speaking Caribbean) is a creole culture which emerged from the contact of European colonists and African slaves.  It exists on a continuum which can be described as Kwekwe on a Saturday night and the formal Anglican wedding on Sunday. 

You do not come out of this culture, though no doubt you are familiar with it, by virtue of being Guyanese.  Now suppose I was to tell you that to be Guyanese you had to ditch your culture (which is an Indo Caribbean creole culture which emerged when Indian indentures had to find space within this world constructed by the earlier arrivals).

This is what Jindal is saying.  Do you agree?  You ought to know that there are many in the Caribbean (especially in the more culturally monolithic countries) who will endorse this view, and you know it.

And it is an established fact that culrurally diverse societies which are based on the salad bowl concept, are healthier than those based on the melting pot concept (or the other extreme where high levels of segregation exists). These societies are dynamic because people with different experiences and value systems freely contribute, without being forced to feel inferior or defensive about who they are.  Those who they encounter learn something new, or are exposed to a different perspective.

USA vs Japan vs France.  Which country is the most dynamic?

Caribj, do you know that all kullie people name spell wrong when Burnham was ruling? If you been think like a kullie, you woulda able to spell Rumjhaat without any problem.  

Maybe they couldnt even spell their names, because if they could have they would have corrected the mistakes.