wat0n wrote:I think we're using the term "assimilation" loosely here. If you want, one can say Italians took 80 years to acculturate (some aspects of Italian culture, like its cuisine, have clearly spread to the broader American society so it's not been a one-way street). Likewise, Blacks have only been able to begin to acculturate since they were allowed to starting in the 1960s or so (with the somewhat earlier example of blues in the 1950s, a precursor to rock music and of African-American origin).
No. First, an immigrant arrives in a community in the USA. Let us pick an Ellis Island arrival in NYC. Italians. They go and find some jobs where knowing and speaking English is not required. They live next door to other Italians and speak and discuss topics of interest all day long. Their children go to schools with other Italian kids in the public school system. They learn English because the school speaks and teaches English as a primary language. The kids only speak Italian to their grandparents and parents in the home. It becomes a language not reinforced formally with formal study. They grow up and speak English as their primary and preferred language of choice, and Italian fluently but as a household and informally used language. For example, they have a hard time writing in Italian without pausing and thinking about it very hard. They never buy books in Italian and prefer to read most of their literature in English and not Italian. Mainly because they were educated and got used to reading in English and they speak in English with the wider society in English and Italian were restricted use language at home only. They marry and they are first-generation immigrant children. The sons and daughters of immigrant parents either never learned English or felt that English was not their preferred language to communicate in. By the time those immigrants from the first generation marry and have their children those second-generation children never hear any Italian at home. Especially if their mother or fathers married outside of the Italian culture and instead married for example Irish or German first-generation immigrants. A common occurrence in a place like NYC at the turn of the century (20th century). That is the process of assimilation in a natural form.
Acculturation is that those children retain their Italian, study it in school formally, add English, and maintain both cultures more or less in equal status. Bolstering both. Bicultural and bilingual in equal measure. They never lose their Italian identity and learn what is needed to get a job, study and navigate a system that is not Italian but American and influenced by English language preferences and a culture that makes WASP culture the central mainstream model of cultural acceptance. But? They do not lose any of their own traditions, they maintain their language and they get a full formal education in both Italian, and English and they also raise their children in the same cultural milieu.
One can see that there is very little assimilation for example with the German Amish. They speak German for many generations because they as a whole rarely assimilate to the mainstream and literally keep their own ways and traditions. They have to pay taxes, and live in the same towns as modern people who prefer televisions, cars and so on, to horse drawn carriages and personal computers. The children of many Amish people never assimilate due to actions they take in preserving their own traditions, language and customs.
There are different degrees of acculturation and different degrees of assimilation but in general assimilation is an experience where you are going to
lose your historical and linguistic identity to blend in with some mainstream model held up by the dominant society as the norm or standard of what being that nationality, or ethnicity or cultural milieu is supposed to represent.Definitions and videos:
African Americans were not really immigrants to the Americas @wat0n . They were forcibly removed from their homelands and were sent to be bought and sold like chattel slaves. To be only property. Not considered human beings with any protections under the law as humans. In fact, they were categorized exactly like one would expect to be categorized if you were a cow or a horse or some animal. If you were an old cow with little milk to be given from your udders? Can't have calves or heifers, and no longer produced milk, maybe you might have value as a skin for leather goods or beef for a cooking pot. Same thought process. If you were a woman all your children will have the same slave status as the female slave. That means if your mother is a slave you are a slave. Property. Your child can be and often was bought and sold just like a calf or a puppy is from a mother dog or mother cow. No, say in that. The reason the children were following the status of the mother is that the law in the US was that you as a slaveowner can impregnate your own slave and those children would never have legal rights to be free and you can sell them off to pay off debt, or loan them out to other farmers or owners who would rent them for a while and you can profit from them. If the father is a free white man and the status followed the father's status as it happened in the Spanish Caribbean islands and the Spanish system? You had to baptize the babies and they could not be considered slaves any longer because the father was a free Roman Catholic Spaniard or Peninsular. One difference between the slave system in Latin America or the Caribbean and the Protestant English system in the Southern USA. The status follows the mother.
I do not want to get into a lot of detail about slaves. Because it is a very interesting and long subject. Since it was an institution that you find in many countries, and cultures and have a lot of differences in how it is practiced and how it worked in the thousands of years it was used as a way of exploitation and working for empires and working for warring factions.
Black Americans or African Americans were actually the ones who had to have the quickest and most efficient way of forceful assimilation of all Americans. They had to learn the language of their masters because if they spoke any language that was not English or French or Spanish (etc. any of the European Imperial languages in the Americas), they would be punished. So that was taken away. Speak Mandinka, Mende, Yoruba, Bantu, Lucumí, etc get whipped or beaten, starved or tied up and punished. Forcibly remove your way to communicate. For the Protestant English in the Southern USA slaveowners they prohibited drums and drum playing. A way of communicating for the Africans. Because the Africans from Western Africa were diverse. They spoke many languages and were from many villages and many lands. They were not all one language. The drums helped bridge that gap of diversity. That was taken away in the English speaking slave states. Not so in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean or Brazil. I won't get into that now...so all this means, that the slave had to also adapt to the religion practiced by their masters. Which was protestant Christianity for the Southern USA states. The customs, the foods, the hierarchies, and the entire culture of the white slaveowners was the one that had to be copied and adapted. But along with that came restrictions to make sure the African slaves would not be independent or be able to understand the laws, the means to gain knowledge about the society they lived in. So education and knowledge were not allowed. Being told about what they could say or how they could be together was highly regulated.
You were property. Like a chair, an animal, or an inanimate object to be bought and sold. You had to work and also what and when you ate, went to the bathroom, or slept or not was all determined by the owners. You also could not be on the road or walk around outside of a certain boundary. Your life cycle was determined by others who had absolute control over everything you could do and your every move.
This went on for years. Centuries. And finally after it is over...where do you go? Your whole life was controlled by the Master and the overseer? You only know how to obey, you can't read or write, you do not own land or property. Your children were taken from you long ago and sold off, your spouse you never knew and were raped and also had no rights, you ate without any consideration from a pig trough and you had no real shoes and no real winter clothing, you were taught nothing that made you able to learn a trade of value. If you had a community you were afraid to get attached since they might be sold away or whipped to death or keel over and die of overwork picking cotton and unceremoniously dumped in some grave to not stink up the place and keep people from their work the next day.
Then you got Jim Crow laws restricting all that you are allowed to do like vote, travel, buy at a store, and the kinds of jobs you can get and the pay you are allowed to earn. Who you can marry or not. And a lot more.
You really have no fucking idea Wat0n what it took for Martin Luther King Jr to get to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to happen. I was born two years after that was passed. I am not that old. Yet, all these traumas are supposed to be evaporated by now. 2023. All while some kid from Chile in Chicago thinks the African Americans are supposed to be assimilated by now. They got ASSIMILATED long ago. By a whip and guns, dogs and force and violence. What they need to do is get equality. Justice and peace. It is LONG OVERDUE.
- By Rancid
- By Doug64