Cultural Displacement Quotes

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

The sad truth is that mass migration, whatever the colour of the skins of those involved, upsets and worries indigenous people, especially the poorest.

With immigrant parents, they've had to sacrifice so much to survive, and they're trying to preserve the culture they lost, so there are just so many boundaries.

We didn't land on plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us".

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

The waves of population and civilization are rolling to the westward, and we now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the South and West by a fair exchange.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

Climate change that is occurring right now is causing so much suffering all around the world. Whether it's adding 30 million people to the "at risk of starvation" list in 2008, whether it's the floods in Pakistan, or entire cultures at risk of disappearing, or desertification in Africa - all these things that are currently being caused by climate change. I think it's something that a lot of people want to figure out: how to make the shift, how to help. It seems like such an overwhelming problem.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

It's hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived.

A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power.

As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other.

Immigration is a kind a proxy war — and maybe a last stand — for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.

The intelligence and prosperity of the American working man is endangered by the present immigration.

I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.

The banishment [of Russian Jews], whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one's country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other.

The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.

I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.

I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

I've always been an outsider everywhere I go - I don't fit in with the Swedish rap community or the American rap community. But who cares?

Comedy comes from tragedy, and being Iranian in America from 1979 on had been quite tragic. In stand-up comedy, I was able to take the reality and exaggerate it.

'Entropy' will be a kaleidoscope of thought processes and my identity as an Indian who grew up in California.