Quotes About Assimilation

Here's my advice to my brown friends: The next time you're on an airplane in the U.S., just speak your mother tongue. That way, no one knows what you're saying. Life goes on.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

I remembered, like, when 'Not When My Daughter' came out, I'm serious, I think dating for Iranian men became a lot harder. Dude's name, Shahrokh - became Tony. Mehsud became Mike.

When I'm in Brazil, I'm not Brazilian at all; I am a gringo. And then when I'm in England, I'm not really English, but when I lived in Canada, I was considered too English. So I never really felt like I clicked somewhere or that I belonged to one place.

When we moved to England in 1986, I was ten years old and I didn't know anything about punk or hip hop. The only words I knew in English were 'dance' and 'Michael Jackson.' We got put in a flat in Mitchum, and the council gave us second hand furniture, second hand clothes and a second hand radio that I took to bed with me every night.

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

If we don't stop immigration - this torrent of immigrants coming in - we're not going to be America anymore because most of the people coming in have no experience with limited government. They don't know what that is.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.

It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.

I kind of like the challenge of jumping into totally different spaces and styles and figuring out how to fit in.

becoming American is less a function of birth or blood and more a function of embracing a set of ideas."14

Whenever I'm in the company of strangers and speak in a way that reveals my Slav accent, the question follows: "Where are you from?" I always reply politely. It's very important to me that I say exactly where I'm from, and explain where that place is in case the person I'm talking to has never hears of my country ("in Europe, near Italy"). I suppose that's the need in me to feel accepted for what I am.

What we become a part of becomes a part of us.

We have survived everything but freedom! he would fulminate from his seat at the end of the dinner table, banging the table with his fist and causing the silverware jump. War, hatred, violence, opression–all these combined could never do to us what Coca-Cola and Disney and Burger King have. We have lost our way! We have intermarried, we have assimilated! We have bought into the American Dream, but that dream is someone else's, and the dream they dream is a dream of our destruction.

Being Taiwanese in Japan was like being a guitar-playing monkey: their fluent Japanese elicited awe from the people they met, yet they were considered not-quite-whole people.

a person can get used to anything if given enough time

In France, they make you feel that you cannot be two things at the same time. You can't be French and Arabic; you can't be French and Muslim.

When I came to America, I was really into all the things people eat here. . . . People called me Muffin because I would eat muffins all the time.

And now after all this time I finally figured out how to trap him... I will become him.