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

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

This breaks my brain. Completely. Plus hello middle east, where civilation has been there long before America was stolen from the natives :P The way she's acting makes me think of America as the borg - you must be assimilated.

While Britain does still have many issues, I have to admit I do appreciate the fact we do have so much diversity and mixture of culture. My street alone has Polish shops, general Asian shops, African shops, Thai shops, Middle East shops.

I remember when the Mosque was first built and there was OMG NOOOOO! responses. Now, people regularly go to the mosque kitchen for award-winning lunches and don't even think twice about the fact that it's a mosque.