What does the saying we're burning in the melting pot mean?

Answer 1

"We're burning in the melting pot."

The United States is often referred to as 'The Melting Pot' of the world. Simply because there are so many different types of people.

So by saying we burning in the melting pot it means that, basically, it's slowly destroying the people that inhabit the United States.

Viva La Revolucion

Answer 2

It means diversity gained is all for naught because those who constitute said diversity suffer from systematic oppression and other challenges common to people of color in the United States. The "melting pot" refers to our country's great diversity and how it benefits our society. To say we are "burning in the melting pot" implies (through metaphor) that the peoples that comprise our nation's diversity are suffering. Suffering so much and on such a vast scale that overall the nation's benefit from diversity is nullified.

Answer 3

The idiom "melting pot" has myriad meanings as is the case with many words and phrases in general and in the English language in particular. The meaning that stands out the most to me in regard to being the most common and useful is the idea that as people from different cultures live together, they tend to assimilate culturally with one another, and so it is in essence, in effect, the cross-cultural assimilation between people from a variety of cultural backgrounds, or as the Cambridge English Dictionary puts it: a place or situation where the people and cultures of many different places mix together. So in this instance, I would surmise that is basically what Immortal Technique was referring to in this line, that to the extent to which our cultural heritage and our personal embodiment thereof determines and defines us as an individual and/or as groups of people, those identities sort of melt away, or perhaps put more helpfully, melt together with the other cultural norms and practices that a person is situated within. Given his general tenor (i.e. the course of thought or meaning that plays out through his songs, the thematic and semantic patterns that permeate his lyrics), his usage of the term "burning in the melting pot" is likely intended to constitute a critique on so-called "American society", connoting/conveying a critical perspective on this tendency to assimilate various cultures together, which has become somewhat commonplace in academia where multiculturalism in the sense of maintaining a diversity of cultures has become more valued the coming together around our common humanity, universal vitality, and spiritual unity, and also amongst various segments of society, particularly amongst those that imbue more importance into their cultural heritage and are thus more inclined to rigidly hold onto the cultural norms and practices with which they identify. This rigidity with which people cling to their cultural identities has also led modern phenomenon of criticizing and resisting so-called cultural appropriation wherein this act of mixing cultures together is gone about more deliberately. This seems folly in at least two profound ways, both in that it limits our capacity to learn from one another and incorporate that which works better for us, that which resonates with us, that which brings us joy, and just as deleterious if not more so, it maintains and reifies identities that impede our coming together around our common humanity (that we are all human beings and members of the human tribe that share the global village of Planet Earth before we are an instantiation of any particular culture, and that we share much more in common as fellow humans than the differences that we tend to focus on for the most part and allow to divide and conquer ourselves), our universal vitality (that we are all living beings and members of the ecologically interdependent biotic community whom collectively comprise the biosphere we call Planet Earth), and our spiritual unity (that we are spiritual beings experiencing a human existence, members of the fellowship of being, fellow ephemeral incarnations of the one essential eternal being underlying and animating everything and everyone, in other words experiencing our essential eternal self as a multiplicity of separate ephemeral selves).