Quotes About Assimilation

It may even be that everybody starts out fairly unique only most people get over it. Come

We're the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they've been told they're supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we're not that bad, maybe even that we're a lot like them. And who would they hate then?

I felt the way I often felt in this country - simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore

Americans can handle one person from anywhere. They had Desi Arnaz from Cuba. And Tin Tan from México. And Rita Moreno from Puerto Rico. But as soon as there are too many of us, they throw up their hands. No, no, no! We were only just curious. We are not actually interested in you people.

We're the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they've been told they're supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we're not that bad, maybe even that we're a lot like them. And who would they hate then?

In the superficial activity of her life, she was all English. She even thought in English. But her long blanks and darkness of abstraction were Polish.

He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.

That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.

That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.

Governor Cameroon of Tanganyika in the 1920s was known as a progressive governor. But when he was attacked for trying to preserve the African personality in the educational system, he denied the charge and declared that his intention was that the African should cease to think as an African and instead should become a fair minded Englishman.

It is true that other countries, particularly in Europe, have in the past several decades opened themselves up to immigration. But the real problem is not immigration but assimilation. Anyone can do immigration. But if you don't assimilate the immigrants—France, for example, has vast, isolated exurban immigrant slums with populations totally alienated from the polity and the general culture—then immigration becomes not an asset but a liability.

will not occur overnight. But it will occur soon—in but two or three generations, a time not much further removed from ours today than the founding of Israel 50 years ago. V. ISRAELI EXCEPTIONALISM Israel is different. In Israel the great temptation of modernity—assimilation—simply does not exist. Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity:

For a society of immigrants such as ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans.

beginning of this book that the instruction in reading that it provides applies to anything you have to or want to read. However,

In other words, he saw himself as simply doing at home what his fellow Europeans had long been doing abroad.

You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

Unofficially, we understood. There was a ceiling. Always had been, always would be. Even for him. Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.

Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?

This is it. The root of it all. The real history of yellow people in America. Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.

because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

Able to pass in any situation as may be required," she says. "I get it all. Brazilian, Filipina, Mediterranean, Eurasian. Or just a really tan White girl with exotic-looking eyes. Everywhere I go, people think I'm one of them. They want to claim me for their tribe.

Once that gets going, doors start opening until they're all open, the whole building buzzing until sunrise, as if nothing matters because nothing does matter because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

He allowed it to happen, allowed himself to become "generic", so that no one could even tell what was happening. He is guilty, Your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Guilty of wanting to become a part of something that never wanted him. The defense rests.

Is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority? What? That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream,