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308d51c
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"But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry,
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white-teeth
zadie-smith
immigrants
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Zadie Smith |
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0583bf3
|
All Americans have something lonely about them. I don't know what the reason might be, except maybe that they're all descended from immigrants.
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immigrants
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Ryū Murakami |
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452366a
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because is one of the magical fantasy words like and and that have now passed into language.
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imaginary-things
immigrants
immigration
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Zadie Smith |
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a10daab
|
She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.
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criticism
immigrants
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
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a90e933
|
This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best -- less trouble).
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immigrants
immigration
race-relations
race
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Zadie Smith |
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7834d38
|
I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.
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racism
slavery
blacklivesmatter
melting-pot
racial-prejudice
lgbtqia
lgbtq
civil-rights
immigrants
immigration
racism-in-america
refugees
|
Richard Wright |
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141cf71
|
This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.
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homelessness
rootedness
satan
immigrants
|
Salman Rushdie |
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fa432e3
|
Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
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assimiliation
emigrants
culture-identity
immigrants
culture
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Maxine Hong Kingston |
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b056bf9
|
A third layer of nativeness was composed of those whom others thought directly descended, even the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion of the rest, it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it. An unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile, a stratum of soil that perhaps made possible all future transplanted soils.
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|
slavery
natives
u-s-history
history-repeating-itself
slaves
us-history
immigrants
immigration
|
Mohsin Hamid |
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b9d4c18
|
He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people's shirts, just above the heart.
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immigrants
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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63846f2
|
Celui qui n'appartient a aucun lieu specifique ne peut, en realite, retourner nulle part.
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|
origin
immigrants
immigration
roots
|
Jhumpa Lahiri |
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a38f5a2
|
I began to feel that this city is my home. It came nearer to my heart, not so distant. That's how it started, but now it's different. I am enjoying making friends my age in my church-non-Bengali friends who don't know the customs that keep a widow so lonely.
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indian-americans
immigrants
ya
|
Mitali Perkins |
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f7cdba6
|
"What's with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians?" I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance." --
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native-american
indians
immigrants
|
Barbara Kingsolver |