By Jens Heycke
New York: Encounter Books, 2023.
Pp. xi, 271. $30.99 paperback.
Jens Heycke’s Out of the Melting Pot, into the Fire tells a story of human suffering and survival that I’ll never forget: a woman survives the Rwandan genocide, and yet today trusts her neighbor—a man who helped murder her own family members—enough to let him babysit her children. It’s a story that combines both the horrors of violent ethnic conflict and the potential of human beings to sometimes put aside those differences and just coexist. Out of the Melting Pot is here to tell us both sides of the global story of ethnic diversity, with little sugarcoating, and in a way that grabs—and deserves to grab—the attention of thoughtful readers wondering what the rise in ethnic diversity in the West portends for the future.
reminds us that ethnic diversity has, horrifyingly, been a focal point for violent social conflict for thousands of years. At the same time, Heycke’s book reminds us that found ways to steer away from that focal point—they’ve found a reasonable degree of social harmony despite high levels of ethnic diversity. And Heycke gives us some history-driven outlines of how concrete government action—social planning, if you will—can sometimes mitigate ethnic conflict. If Heycke is right, it looks like the West is going to need a lot of that social planning, along with careful scholarship and reporting that lets us know which kinds of ethnic conflict mitigation strategies are likely to work and which are likely to fail. Is the West up to that level of social planning and thoughtful scholarship? I guess we’ll see.
