Integration or Assimilation

Today's post grew very long, after many days of rumination. Somehow this topic has been tickling my consciousness for a while now, but has only recently come up in clearer terms. I hope it's not too cumbersome, but having rolled around in my head now for so long, I felt it was time to write it down.

Several days ago in class we had a very enlightening conversation. Grit brought up a comment that the Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan recently made about Turkish-Germans. He said flat-out that "assimilation is a crime against humanity. I repeat... assimilation is a crime against humanity." That's right, he said it twice just to make sure you heard him correctly. Grit asked the students how they felt about this comment. Most of the students seemed to find it a little extreme, but emphasized once and again how they could never forget where they came from, their traditions, their culture. They seemed to buy into the idea that accepting the German culture and lifestyle meant that you must forfeit the identity passed on to you by your ancestors. There seemed to be a general consensus that in order to emigrate successfully to another country one must learn to tolerate and live amongst the original inhabitants. In other words, it is necessary to integrate to a certain extent into the host culture. They drew the line however at taking on any of the host culture's other traits. For them to do so would be to betray their traditional culture. With a few exceptions all of these students were born and raised in Germany.

In order to better understand what the argument surrounding assimilation and integration was about, we decided to look up several dictionary definitions of the terms. We put up several definitions we found. For example:

assimilation
noun
1.	the state of being assimilated; people of different backgrounds come to see themselves as part of a larger national family
2.	the social process of absorbing one cultural group into harmony with another
3.	the process of absorbing nutrients into the body after digestion
4.	a linguistic process by which a sound becomes similar to an adjacent sound
5.	the process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive structure [syn: acculturation]
6.	in the theories of Jean Piaget: the application of a general schema to a particular instance

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

in·te·gra·tion (ĭn'tĭ-grā'shən) n.

1. 1. The act or process of integrating.
   2. The state of becoming integrated.
2. The bringing of people of different racial or ethnic groups into unrestricted and equal association, as in society or an organization; desegregation.
3. Psychology The organization of the psychological or social traits and tendencies of a personality into a harmonious whole.
4. Mathematics The process of computing an integral; the inverse of differentiation.
5. Electronics The process of placing more than one integrated circuit on a single chip.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Several distinctions strike me immediately. Both words can refer to the union of people from different cultures. Both imply the formation of a harmonious whole. However, integration suggests a sort of separateness, several different circuits that exist in the same place, but which have distinct and separate paths. What is most important about the term assimilation is its implication of understanding, of comprehension. A person assimilates new information when they truly understand it. I also appreciate its implication that people of different backgrounds can share a common identity. Integration is based principally on tolerance, whereas assimilation is based on mutual understanding. Thus for me assimilation is a much more powerful and harmonious concept. Tolerance presupposes a sort of disapproval, which must be overlooked in order to be able to endure someone. This is why I do not see tolerance as the ultimate goal when dealing with diversity.

After hearing my students affirm their loyalty to their ancestral traditions, I told them that for me living according to the traditions of my ancestors is simply not a possibility. Americans in general have many parts which make up their ancestral background. My identity is not dominated by the places my family immigrated from. Rather, it is something much more fluid than my students had ever imagined possible. I explained for example, that when I lived in Mexico, I assimilated to Mexican culture. I had to learn to think and behave according to their cultural norms if I wanted to be part of society there. Mexican culture allowed them to make room for me, and they accepted me both as an American and as a member of their community. I don't want to downplay the challenges of assimilation, but if the host culture and new resident are both willing, it is attainable, and in my opinion desirable.

My students were agape when I told them that after living in Mexico, my identity expanded to include my Mexican cultural assimilation. And yet, at the same time I never felt like I had sacrificed or betrayed my American identity. In fact, after my experience I don't believe it would be possible for me to do so. No one has ever told these kids that they can be more than just one thing, that their national identity can have multiple facets. As I told them of my Mexican experience, I also realized something about my German experience. I will never assimilate here. German culture does not allow foreigners to assimilate. To a certain extent, integration is possible, but without German blood, one has no right to claim German identity. In fact, by mere virtue of the fact that part of my ancestry is German, from their perspective I am less foreign than the students in my class who were born here in Berlin. Those students are condemned to be forever foreigners, born in a country which withholds from them its national identity, many never having set foot in their faraway"homelands".

US Election Mania in Germany

I wrote this little anecdote up for Daniela at the US Embassy. We had coffee the other day along with the other two Fulbright kids who helped with the Building Bridges conference. We started talking about the election and I mentioned how surprised I was to find a lot of interest in the election among my students. She said that that kind of information is really good for them to know, so that they can convince people in Washington to send good speakers to Germany. So I wrote this up for her:

In the course of working as a Fulbright Teaching Assitant in Berlin, I was recently asked by one of the teachers to give one of his classes a brief overview of the election process and and introduction to the candidates. I was concerned that our complicated system might be difficult for them to understand in English, and that the topic would be utterly uninteresting to them in general. The U.S. Election is all over the news here in Germany, its coverage even eclipsing a lot of domestic political issues. However, I never imagined that this interest might have penetrated the consciousness of a class of 11 graders. I was totally shocked by how knowledgeable and interested the students in the class were. The normally somewhat rowdy and talkative class listened attentively as I tried to explain the basics of the electoral system. When I asked them what they knew about the candidates, several students piped up at once naming the top contenders. When I pressed them for more information, some of the students were able to give me very up-to-date details on who the candidates were, what they were saying, and how they were being perceived. Not surprisingly, while their knowledge of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama left me agape, they knew almost nothing about the slew of candidates on the other side of the party line. In Germany, interest even among the youth, in this election is astonishing. You would be hard pressed to find students in an American school that were more knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the election. And my school is by no means elite. On the contrary it is one of the schools in Berlin with an undeserved bad reputation. It is a school in which every one of German's ethnic and religious minorities are well represented. The interest these students have in the direction of American Politics can well be said to represent the feelings of the broadest spectrum of the German population.