Quotes About Assimilation

Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other.

I had no accomplishments except surviving. But that isn't enough in the community where I came from, because everybody was doing it. So I wasn't prepared for America, where everybody is glowing with good teeth and good clothes and food.

It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen

For us to perceive intelligence, it has to fit within our behavioural framework.

The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

Educated blacks] Society refuses to consider them genuine Negroes. The Negro is a savage, whereas the student is civilized. "You're us," and if anyone thinks you are a Negro he is mistaken, because you merely look like one.

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.

The colonized intellectual has invested his aggression in his barely veiled wish to be assimilated to the colonizer's world. He has placed his aggression at the service of his own interests, his interests as an individual.

Dernièrement, un camarade nous racontait cette histoire. Un Martiniquais arrivant au Havre entre dans un café. Avec une parfaite assurance, il lance : « Garrrçon ! un vè de biè. » Nous assistons là à une véritable intoxication. Soucieux de ne pas répondre à l'image du nègre-mangeant-les-R, il en avait fait une bonne provision, mais il n'a pas su répartir son effort.

I mixed with ordinary people about the same way that a bucket of paint mixed with a bag of gerbils.

We know how to chameleon our way through the day

He was born an Englishman and remained one for years.

the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.

Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation...

My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.

If you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you dream alike. But if you dream something different, you are not in America, of America American, but a Hottentot in Africa, or a Kalmuck, or a chimpanzee. The moment you have a different thought you cease to be an American. And the moment you become something different you find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland.

Tenía que aprender a vivir con la escoria, a nadar como una rata de alcantarilla o ahogarme. Si optas por incorporarte al rebaño, eres inmune. Para que te acepten y te aprecien, tienes que anularte, volverte indistinguible del rebaño.

We are very like the English, — are, in fact, English under a different sky.

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

If half-black Barack Obama had decided years ago to call himself white - which his genes certainly entitled him to do - his story would have carried very different meaning. If millions of part-black people had followed him into whiteness, then the N.A.A.C.P. would be in true crisis.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too.

When my father came out on stage wearing a big cowboy hat and a shirt lettered 'Bar Mitzvah Ranch' to sing 'Home on the Range' in Yiddish, it was his way of saying, 'I want to be an American.'

I never learned to speak Yiddish, ever.