Thread by @sighing_sadly

@slate11 @PirateWires I guess that you didn't read the article.



"Assimilate" can mean a lot of things. The Cajuns are distinctive, with their own language, sure, but they also know English and I've never heard anybody doubt their loyalty to America.archive.is/tmxiQ

@slate11 @PirateWires The kind of assimilation that Sagnik Basu is talking about is that of becoming an American in a meaningful sense, somebody whose relationship with America is that one has with one's home and not just that a shopper would have with a shopping mall she was in.

@slate11 @PirateWires Think about some of the recent discussions on Twitter between Indian-Americans and Indians in which the Indians are calling the Indian-Americans "worthless traitors," because we won't advance India's interests at the expense of America, and we're telling them to get a grip.

@slate11 @PirateWires At some point along the way, as we sat in these discussions between the (usually White) Americans and these sub-continental people who look like us, for us "we" came to mean the Americans and not the Indians.

@slate11 @PirateWires Other things tend to happen, too, like my and my French-American mate's growing obsession with Film Noir, Jazz, Westerns, American Victorian architecture, and so many other things, but these are individual preferences, not requirements for Americanness.

@slate11 @PirateWires I don't see how anybody could not love barbecue and Civil War re-enactments, but as far as that goes, it's all good.

@slate11 @PirateWires But if I had entered that discussion with the Indian guys demanding that America be made into expansion space for India's unsustainably growing population and saw them as anything other than outsiders with ridiculous demands, that would not have been cool.

See the difference?