Acceptance and Change

[tablesaw]

That sounds like a very nice title, but this is not a nice post.

Yeah, it's about Elizabeth Moon, who said unbelievable wrong and harmful things about immigration, assimilatin, and most especially Islam. There once were hundreds of comments carefully picking out the threads of ignorance from the post and exposing them for what they were, but they're all gone now.

The point here is that in order to accept large numbers of immigrants, and maintain any social cohesion, acceptance by the receiving population is not the only requirement: immigrants must be willing and able to change, to merge with the receiving population.

If you want to look at the power imbalance in the way "assimilation" is framed in America, it's right there. The two cultures involved aren't given equal or reciprocal duties. It's the minority's duty to change, and it's the majority's duty to accept the changes of the minority. In practice, it translates to:

If you change, then we will accept you.

If you don't change (or don't change enough), then we no longer have to accept you.

Because for Moon (and so many others) "social cohesion" is the safety of continuity afforded by cultural dominance. If you want evidence of this, well you can look to the plethora of personal responses that have sprung up in response to Moon's ignorance. deepad has links and comments, karnythia also has links. Highly recommended is shweta_narayan's "Dissimilation"

Comments

[brigid]

Thanks for talking about this, and the links.

[yeloson]

I wonder, if 20 years from now, if she'll polish up her Spanish in order to assimilate into the American majority?

[tablesaw]

I didn't read the comments where she directly talked about Mexicans, but the dog whistles all sounded like the people extremely angry at companies who dare to speak Spanish to people who might buy their products.

[jjhunter]

Thanks for posting; I just caught up this morning.