On assimilation by force

[winter]

A few people on my f-list have already linked to Elizabeth Moon's diatribe on why immigrants should shut up and change to be just like everyone else. I didn't comment on it, because I literally couldn't find the words.

Shweta Narayan says it more eloquently than I ever could.

I have the luck of spending most of my childhood in a country where others are like me, and of a multi-cultural education from the cradle. But I was also a Slav travelling in Western Europe just after communism ended. I was nine years old, in a supermarket in Paris, and I talked to my mother in halting, broken French, because I knew that if I spoke Polish, everyone in the shop would stare and follow us to make sure we didn't steal anything.

Comments

[trinker.livejournal.com]

If your father ever brings it up again...tell him that my grandmother was born in the U.S., and that I speak fluent English, and dress like a "mainstream American", but I still don't count as "American" to some bigots. Because my face says "didn't come from Europe".

It's not only recent immigrants that get hazed. Some of us really can't assimilate enough.