by Zinga Hart

They called it a melting pot, as if unity were a heat that could fuse strangers into sameness. But what they built was a crucible — an alchemical experiment without consent.

Into the pot went gold and iron, salt and bone, gospel and grief. They stirred it with manifest destiny and called it progress. But some metals don’t melt. Some remember their divine structure. Gold resists corrosion; iron remembers its chain.

In America’s version of alchemy, assimilation became the price of access. “Melt down,” they said, “and you’ll rise again as one.” But what if your soul’s chemistry was never meant to liquefy? What if your light — black, blue, and golden all at once — wasn’t meant to dissolve, but to refract?

That’s the truth hidden in the shimmer of moonlight, the same glint the poet Sergio Roper caught when he wrote:

> In the moonlight, black boys turn blue,
but we can also be golden too.



The melting pot promised harmony through heat. The mirror promises harmony through recognition. One burns difference away; the other reflects it into art.

Maybe that’s what Dante understood when he walked through hell without lineage or law to bind him — he wasn’t melting, he was witnessing. He passed through the inferno not as one purified by fire, but as one who could name the flames.

America’s myth was never about freedom — it was about fusion.
But the next evolution isn’t to melt. It’s to gleam.

We are the new alloy — not blended, but balanced.
Not molten, but mirrored.
Not white-hot, but golden.