Quotes About Assimilation

There is a kind of misconception that Asian-Americans are not as American as European-Americans.

People feel I don't mix much, but I'm working at it.

I myself am mixed race - my mother is Korean, and my father is an American Jew - so I've always felt other.

Literally everything good about this culture comes from mixing.

While we can learn from U.S. models, we certainly can't practice them.

The fact is, I'm half-British, half-Malaysian. For an Asian who's grown up in America to be commenting on how Asian I am when they've never left America... does that make them more or less Asian than me?

Both my mother-in-law and Rajiv made it easy for me. I feel very Indian and am not conscious of being an Italian in India.

I was one of the first six black kids to integrate a formerly all-white school. I remember being looked at all the time and people laughing at my hair. I was also very self-conscious about the food I had for lunch. I had egg sandwiches, and the other mothers gave kids fancy stuff like bologna and Marmite. It took about a year to settle in.

The counterintuitive result is that presenting people with a detailed and balanced account of both sides of the argument may actually push people away from the center rather than pull them in. If we already have strong opinions, then we'll seize upon welcome evidence, but we'll find opposing data or arguments irritating. This biased assimilation of new evidence means that the more we know, the more partisan we're able to be on a fraught issue.

As harsh as it may sound to some of us, Toni Morrison had it right when she suggested, "In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

One of the first rules the Emperor had drummed into her [Mara Jade] so long ago was to blend in as best she could with her surroundings

She was here, and it was now; and as the emperor's instructors had so often drummed into her, the first item of business was to fit into her surroundings. And that meant not looking like an escapee from the medical ward

This is another paradox of our era: as native-born people find themselves surrounded by foreign-born people, they become less likely to explore our own country or the world. They become homebodies. The proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit, and the trend continues to creep upward.

Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she met. They were amused by her because she did not straighten her hair. When she tried to make up her face as they did, it came off rather badly. Their goading glances and private snickers at her way of talking (saying "chil'ren") and dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes.

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song - all of it cooked together in the color of my skin.

Racism had no place in the Marxist lexicon; dead Jews were posthumously assimilated into the same local communities that had so disliked them when they were alive. But

become the adviser to presidents and an honored member of New England society. Ohiyesa, or Eastman, went to Beloit College where he learned English and immersed himself in the culture and ways of the white world. Upon graduation he went east. He attended Dartmouth College, then was accepted into medical school at Boston University, which he completed in 1890. He returned to his native Midwest to work among his own people as a physician on the Pine Ridge reservation

The contemporary needs of North American Jews are directly tied to the trajectory of the immigrant experience in North America. The generation now coming of age is the first generation we may call fully American, American Jews.

The most prolific and accomplished hunters were not the most bloodthirsty and indefatigable. They were the most cool and empathetic. They were the ones who were able to assimilate their quarry's mind-set--to see through the eyes of their prey and thus reliably predict its deft, innate trajectories of evasion.

Here in America, where every nationality confirmed its stereo-type

Bad words are like eating fruit from a poison tree. The deadly fruit of destructive words encompasses us every day. It is up to us not to consume and assimilate these words by allowing them to take root in our minds and hearts.

A] sense of moral inferiority" writes Jung "always indicates that the missing element is something which, to judge by this feeling about it, really ought not to be missing, or which could be made conscious if only one took sufficient trouble. . .Whenever a sense of moral inferiority appears, it indicates not only a need to assimilate an unconscious component, but also the possibility of such assimilation.

The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.