My point is that this identity was expanded to be inclusive in order to build social cohesion. That was a good thing, but now let’s rename it to just “American” and include all ethnic groups, instead of going backwards.
Social cohesion largely as a means of sharpening anti-Blackness and of labor control, particularly during and after the defeat of Reconstruction and due to growing relevance of the industrial organized labor movement. Du Bois did an immense amount of work critiquing pretty much exactly this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924
Of course they didn’t have it as bad as black Americans, but that isn’t the topic of this discussion.
It's extremely important to acknowledge that the barriers to social cohesion for certain races are significantly higher than others. We are in living memory where black children had to be accompanied by the military for their protection because they dared attend the same school as white people.
I’m struggling to see how your comment relates to what I’m saying.
If one wants to solve the injustices of the past, its important to actually acknowledge the reality of those injustices and how they feed into modern day. The "melting pot" theory I suspect was always a form of injustice in of itself, because it expected people to simply forget what happened to them and accept that they'll never get an apology have amends made for them.