Question: "So what's wrong with normal regular America that we have to celebrate diverse people and cultures?"
Answer: Diverse people and cultures are America.
E pluribus unum.
The USA was founded as an idea, not a blood-and-soil ethnic people. The writers of the Constitution had no choice but to accept diversity as they understood it. The Protestants of New England with close ties to England had to join with the Quakers and German speakers of Pennsylvania and the Roman Catholics of Maryland. Their diversity was imperfect. They did not include indigenous people. They kicked the can down the road on the enslavement of Black Americans. They did not mention women. But the idea was there: We are a republic that joined diverse people in a single polity.
We are experiencing a counter-revolution against globalism, modernism, the free movement of labor and therefore diversity itself. This shows up as efforts to insist on the centrality of Americans of White European ethnicity in the story of the USA. In that understanding, non-conforming people are minor players in the real story of real Americans. That definition of the "real" America has required marginalization of Women, Blacks, Native Americans, Mormons, Jews, and people from outside White Northern Europe, including Greeks, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, and many others. It required marginalizing the Hispanics who predate annexation of the American Southwest and the ones who immigrated since.
A metaphor facilitates that marginalization, the "melting pot." It defines those groups as proto-Americans who disappear as they become real ones when they melt.
The Multicultural Fair makes an opposite point. They don't melt and disappear. They change that pot. America includes them. Their histories aren't a sideshow. They are American history. Black soul music, whether sung by a Black man or a White woman, is American. Middle Eastern Belly Dancing is American. Philippine, Japanese, Mexican, and Ukrainian music and dancing is American. Philippine, Hawaiian, Japanese, Mexican, and Peruvian food trucks are serving American food, right along with the ones selling hot dogs and cotton candy.
The event was not political, and yet it made an unsaid political statement by its very existence. We were seeing America. It was a good Saturday. Children ran around. Parents sampled food trucks. The rain stopped just in time.
Sorry I missed it. It was fun last year.
Thanks!
A good reminder that we are all part of the melting pot