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

[winter]

*pats* It makes sense in the context of good intentions :)

I commented to someone above that a multi-cultural environment isn't easy - and that's just what makes it interesting. For what it's worth, one of the most fascinating people during my Erasmus term in Ireland was a Iraqi Kurdish woman who'd immigrated to Sweden after the first Gulf War. She was the oldest of us, and she'd been through some horrific things - if not for Sweden's policies she would not have been there at all, never would have had this opportunity to go with me and a Finnish girl to an English fort on an Irish coastline and wonder whether the guy we passed was an elf, with his pointy ears.

And she was living with an ethnic Swedish girl. When it was their turn to host our unofficial Erasmus dinners, they made Kurdish stew and pepparkakor. It all fit :)