Link: Shweta on trying to assimilate

[redbird]

Prompted by a long, anti-Muslim and strongly pro-assimilation post by Elizabeth Moon, shweta_narayan wrote about the pressure to assimilate and how it has affected her.

This is hard stuff, but worth reading. It's not everyone's experience, but it's real, and difficult, and seldom seen by those of us who are, at least mostly, part of the dominant culture. Because one of the demands, often, is that people should pretend that assimilation was straightforward.

(I may post about what Moon said later, but Shweta's post is worth reading even if you've never heard of Elizabeth Moon.)

Comments

[jayblanc]

It isn't quite as explicit, but only in retrospect do I recognise how much of my time in school was spent being exposed to attempts explicit and unconscious to teach me that an Irish heritage was nothing to be proud of.

[randomness]

There are parts of her story which very much ring true for me. I think I was luckier in that I started in a mixed-ethnicity neighborhood in New Jersey and then went to a largely white-ethnic one in Connecticut. Also, my experience as a boy tended more to the less-subtle harassment of being beaten up. I nonetheless think I would have had a terrible time in the English schools she went to.

That said I think I never had the experience of having had to hide my ethnicity or my interests, which largely revolved around food. And as she did, I developed a finely-tuned sense of the social valences around various bits of culture.

But I'm still pretty wary around groups of random young men.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Her post broke my heart with truth. There was so much there I recognized the terrible feeling of undergoing, so much that I witnessed and feared but hadn't had to live through, and so much that filled me with utter horror.