Quotes About Assimilation

Even though I'm Hispanic, I'm so white.

I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.

When I came here, I was a little bit different and in Finland people didn't really accept me, and then I came here and I saw Honey G doing so well and I thought 'British people are so great, they accept Honey G as she is, so maybe they'll accept me as well.'

As human beings, we have the blessing and the curse that we're able to adapt to almost anything. No matter how extreme the circumstances you're in, they become normal.

I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that too, but I wouldn't understand why.

Beth sent on comm, "Guests? We're immigrants. This is some kind of entrance exam?

Moe Berg. Until he's finished reading a paper, he considers it 'alive' and refuses to let anyone else touch it. When he's done, it's 'dead' and anybody can read it. Says he wants to integrate everything from various papers, get a picture—every day." "Then

The weeks I'd spent in Bombay with Prabaker had taught me that the shaking or wiggling of the head from side to side—that most characteristic of Indian expressive gestures—was the equivalent of a forward nod of the head, meaning Yes.

I just always knew that I lived in two worlds. There was the world of my house and community, but to make my way in that white world I had to modify the way I spoke and acted. I had to sometimes not make direct eye contact.

Maybe to feel like an Afghan I needed to be born and raised in the States, and maybe I needed to live in Afghanistan for nearly a decade to feel like an American. Both worlds shaped me, but neither one of them completely correspond to the picture I have of myself.

I think that black people, to a degree, need to have a certain level of dexterity. If we want to be at the highest level of whatever our field is, we have to be able to navigate both worlds. We all just know that you gotta be able to put that suit on and have a conversation with people that don't look like you or your family.

Growing up, I've always felt I was from two different worlds. I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Vietnam, and they raised my sisters and I with the parenting methods of the Vietnamese culture.

I had never been in a supermarket before coming to America. At home, my parents wouldn't let me open the refrigerator, because they worried I'd damage the door by opening it too many times.

Koreans are worried about the Japanese right-wing people, who tend to be against foreigners. But the Koreans in Japan aren't even foreigners. They are essentially culturally Japanese. If a family has lived in Japan for three generations, it's absurd to see them as foreigners.

I still have a Japanese passport. I haven't become an American citizen, and I am worried about getting deported every day.

That's sort of part of the American ethic - is not to worry too much about the past and that it shouldn't define us. And most certainly, that was the case with my mother, who was an immigrant to America.

I grew out of the habit of thinking or worrying about being seen as the typical Asian. I don't even know what that means anymore. I'm not really concerned with it.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

I've always said I'm the worst representative of Muslim-Americans that's ever existed, because I've been inside more bars than mosques.

When a country loses its identity, it no longer knows what it is or where it comes from and what its real worth is. So it dissolves.

These days it's cool to be ethnic and to be different, but when I was a kid, it was not cool - at all. My friends would come over and my mom would make crepes with eggs, stuffed with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and spinach. And they'd be like, 'What is this?'

When I first came out, I was wearing full-on traditional Nigerian wear. I got told by a lot of people that I should just tone it down. I only stopped when I realized there's only so many prints you can wear.

I toned down my accent at school; otherwise, people would pick on me.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.