Quote:
Originally Posted by flameswin
Immigrants are fine if they just blend in....
Apu: (Trying to blend in) Let's take a relaxed attitude toward work, and watch the baseball match. The Ny Mets are my favorite squadron
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right. I'm going to take this way too seriously again, but I just feel I have to say this.
I know you are just kidding, but there is this sentiment that immigrants don't assimilate at all that I find to be fairly false. At least among those outside the NE.
I am an Albertan, my parents are Albertans, and my grandparents adopted Alberta as their home. To say that my grandparents did not act foreign or seem foreign on occasion would be to fudge the truth, but surely that is true of the grandparents and great-grandparents of many people of Ukranian origin or from other non-French or British areas in Europe.
I don't really know anyone my age of Arab origin who has grown up here or lived here most of their life that does not act pretty much like a Calgarian. Yet that often isn't the perception among other people. It's not really racism, it's just a weird sort of notion that your skin color prevents you from being part of a culture with a different skin color. The fact that I smoke hookah, eat hummus and falafel, and occasionally wear a keffiyeh around my neck does mean that to an extent I embrace my Arab heritage, but does not indicate a rejection of being Albertan or Canadian more than a Jewish person observing Yom Kippur does, or more than a Celtic person playing the fiddle does. There seems to be this sort of notion that if you're not from a particular category of ethnic origin, you have to abandon more of your heritage to be considered 'Canadian'. People are much less tolerant in general, I'd say, of an Indian family celebrating Diwali, than numerous other observances.
It just seems like a lot of people want non-whites to conform to some sort of unfair, absurd standard they set, which appears to be behaving like an average Walmart patron.