Nobody wants to go back to the fifties. Assimilation as we understand it today would mean giving up our strengthening, enriching sense of group identity. I do think, though I may be at odds with other voices on this issue, that we've lost that sense of balance between clan and commonweal that I believe is so important. There is so much stuff so much heavy, tangible stuff on the particularist side of the scale. Kids begin learning about what makes them different from each other in elementary school.
Public policy reinforces the idea when it categorizes people by color or ethnicity.
Politicians and the media codify it when they talk about the black or Asian or Latino perspective that has to represented in every institution. But meanwhile, nobody is talking about what we all have in common. Nobody thinks about what it means to be American. Nobody's interested in the ways they might actually be similar to someone with a different group identity. Nobody asks what we can learn from our common history.