Social Assimilation Quotes

Suddenly in high school, I'm in a predominantly Jewish atmosphere. Jewish people were my gate to white America.

The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money - generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies - buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the 'community,' identifying with the place in a familiar way.

When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there's time for assimilation to do its work.

The Indian community in Canada has integrated much better than the Indian community in United States. They've become really Canadian at the same time as keeping all their Indian characters and customs and social groups.

The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring.

What happens when I go to America is I sound really English. Most people would start sounding American, but I do the opposite.

Every other year, I was the new boy. I found that the only way to survive was to embrace it, make a little fortress on the outside and to pretend to blend in but not to invest too much because you'll be somewhere else next year.

To be honest, it's easier for me to speak with an American accent.

I'm half-Mexican - get used to it 'cause in about five to 10 years, you're all gonna be related to one. Whether you like it or not, no matter how much you prepared your family, you're gonna show up at Thanksgiving one of these years, you're gonna walk in and say, 'Hey! What's happening? Since when did we start serving flan?' Well, what's happening is that somebody's boning a Latino.

We live in a classist, racist, homophobic society into which we are very assimilated, that's all. I'm not really proud about that.

There was a time when I wanted to get out of the Western world. I went down to Grenada and looked at a place, and I realised that if I lived in a Grenadian manner I'd be nothing but a blah. I'm going to need constant bodyguarding, guns and money to join the community there. Otherwise you just got a bunch of fat, old white people dying together, overeating, drinking. Not very attractive.

I'm fascinated by how ethnic communities have assimilated into massive capitalist environments.

Negroes have not thoroughly assimilated.

Whatever be the qualities of the man with whom a woman is united according to the law, such qualities even she assumes, like a river, united with the ocean.

I don't really consider myself an immigrant, because I was born French; I have always spoken the language. I never had the feeling of being a foreigner. I was very lucky: I came to France, and I had enough money to study and to rent a studio. So, for me, it was not difficult.

Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.

You gain all of the rights and privileges and respects that are afforded the majority, and that's ultimately what matters for your kids, or anybody - because we're all innocent of the fact that we are the way we are. But it also means the ways that you coped, and the languages and narratives and points of view that you had no choice but to make from the sidelines - and that often carried with them really acute readings of dominant society - those no longer have the same need.

To ensure assimilation we want to ensure that it works. Assimilation, an important word. Integration and upward mobility.

Whoever lives in whichever state should learn the culture of thestate and its language.

When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

I'm always pointing things out to native New Yorkers that I think are weird about this place and their culture and all that. But I feel like my friends and family from California feel like I've totally "become a New Yorker."

Coming from Morocco was just different, man. It's a third-world country, and you are trying to make it happen. That's all it is. I didn't have any problem hooking up with the black kids because I'm from North Africa. And as far as Latinos, we are all the same.

As a 'parisien d'adoption,' I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric.

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.