Is Assimilation a Good or a Bad Thing?

Or "When Cultural Competence is Culturally Incompetent."

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

The subject of ‘assimilation’ is one that I have been meaning to write about for some time. It refers to an expectation that newcomers to a country will take on enough of its culturally dominant values, customs and core beliefs to “fit in” and abandon those of their own which are not seen as compatible. I have a view on this which, unsurprisingly, differs from both that of the Critical Social Justice (woke) activists which focuses on ‘cultural diversity’ and the nationalistic conservatives which focuses on ‘cultural cohesion.’ Further, I think both of them (but particularly the CSJ activists) are mistaken in what migrants to Western countries are most commonly being expected to assimilate to. I concede that my view on this is probably somewhat biased by the number of new arrivals from non-Western countries who contact me asking some variation of “What the hell is this diversity, equity and inclusion thing and why do I have to pretend to believe in it?” More on this further down.

I am inspired to write about this today because this clip from a VICE panel on the subject on assimilation was brought to my attention. In this particular part of discussion, the main speaker is a young American man who appears to be of East Asian ancestry. He argues that assimilation is not only a great thing but a necessary thing and that America cannot survive as a stable functioning society if people don’t, to some degree, say “This is what we are going to commonly agree on.” He is challenged upon this by another panellist who asks who is going to choose what that is, to which he says “The majority culture, I suppose.” The challenger then politely points out that this would be the people in power and another, more flippantly and dismissively, says it would be ‘wypipo’ (white people) and appears sceptical that the first speaker could mean anything else. The original speaker says he does not think that ‘quote white unquote’ interests controls things. His literal use of the words ‘quote’ and ‘unquote’ suggests he is sceptical that there is a cohesive ‘white culture.’

When asked if he believes in white supremacy, he says that he believes there are people who believe in white supremacy but that American is not a white supremacist state and, if it were, the panel would not be happening. He goes on to say that in his neighbourhood, Brooklyn, most people are not white and are going about doing their own thing and going to work. The clip ends where he is asked whether they are making the same amount of money and we do not get to hear his answer to this.

As a general rule, it is not ideal to look at one short clip (1.40 seconds) from a longer discussion and form an opinion of the views of all the participants, especially if this is used to denigrate any individual, take their words out of context or define their views by those few utterances. However, there can also be value in being able to closely analyse a small number of statements, tone and body language within a discussion and consider these as ideas and attitudes that are found in current discourse. This enables us to look at the ideas rather than the person and does not ignore the reality that the exchange took place in the context of a longer discussion and so does not define the entire worldview of any of the individuals or denigrate any of their characters.

The four individuals, one woman and three men, who speak in this clip are all people who would not generally be designated as ‘white’ although I will not attempt to designate a ‘race’ to any of them. They are all young - probably Gen Z - and they all speak with American accents, suggesting that, if any of them are immigrants, their arrival was not recent and their formative years were likely spent in the US. The three other people who speak clearly disagree with the original speaker although their attitudes are decidedly different.. The man seated next to him is listening intently to the argument and demonstrates a wish to understand it and challenge it through courteous questioning while the man in front of him is polite but more direct and assertive and the woman is mocking and dismissive. Despite their differing attitudes, they all clearly agree with each other on this issue as the courteous man gives way to the woman gesturing to indicate his agreement with her. (Do watch it yourself to see if you agree with my assessment of the attitudes). The original speaker is assertive but polite in his own views. It is also notable that he is dressed conservatively in a suit and tie while the other panelists are more casually dressed.

This is all interesting to me as it demonstrates not only viewpoint diversity among the group of young people who would be considered, by Social Justice Activists, to have a similar “positionality” in American society but also the difference in attitudes towards discussion (almost as though they were individuals). These ideas and these attitudes are what we see more broadly in society and so we can step away from these four individuals (who may well express different ideas and attitudes later) and look at them as discourses - ways of talking about things.

The first speaker is expressing quite typically moderate conservative views about social cohesion when he says that a society can only be stable and functional if there is a general consensus about values as decided by the majority culture. This stance is not extreme or authoritarian as it does not require people to agree on absolutely everything as indicated by his use of ‘to some degree’ and it is not racist or xenophobic as he does not think that race or nationality matter as much as shared values. It is, however, somewhat unrealistic as we have not yet ever had a society which was not divided along factional lines. Even in times and places where everybody has been the same colour and had the same religion and grown up in the same culture, they have had decidedly different values and fought about them. This is a thing that humans seem to do.

This is also a somewhat illiberal view and the other panelists are not wrong to point out the problems with the powerful deciding what values and customs everyone should have. This only seems like a good idea when the people in power have ideas you agree with. As the protests in Iran and Afghanistan about the rights of women show as well as the treatment of Uighur Muslims in China and the treatment of LGBT people in Russia, assimilating to majority or dominant cultural norms cannot be considered an inherently great thing or a necessary thing even by social conservatives who value cultural cohesion. You would only need to transplant them to a country in which their own religious or cultural values were in the minority for them to recognise the value of a liberal society in which they were allowed to practice them and not expected to assimilate to the majority culture.

Of course, the original speaker was talking in the context of the US which has strong laws on the protection of freedom of speech and separation of Church and state and we can assume that these are part of the values he wishes to have a consensus upon. These laws, however, do not constitute the entirety of power in the US and the panelists disagreeing with him would be very likely to say that laws preventing racial discrimination did not make racism go away. The cultural power of dominant ideas may well impact more on an individual’s life than laws do and it is these that newcomers to a country might well find themselves expected to assimilate to.

The question then becomes, “What are the culturally dominant ideas that migrants to a Western country like the US or UK are pressured to assimilate to?” The other panelists immediately came up with the answer of ‘white supremacy’ which the original speaker disagreed with. He simply did not believe that the United States is dominated by the belief in the superiority of white people and dedicated to their interests. He had not observed this in his life as an American who is not white living among other Americans who are mostly not white. However, the other panelists were also not white and were fairly sure that America is a white supremacist state.

This produces something of an impasse if one is to go on the ‘lived experience’ of ‘people of colour’ living in a majority ‘white’ society. They simply do not agree on this subject.

This somewhat supports my argument earlier that the aim to have a society in which people can say “This is something we commonly agree on” is unrealistic although trends certainly exist with just over half of black Americans believing their race has hindered their prospects compared to only 24% of Hispanic and Asian Americans. However, the report also notes that: “Across all racial and ethnic groups, more point to their own hard work than to any other attribute, including their race, their gender, the people they know or their family’s financial situation, as something that helped them get ahead” suggesting that there are shared perceptions across racial groups. The report also found that level of education affected perceptions with black Americans being more likely to believe their race to have held them back if they had attended university.

However, while perceptions may vary, there is a reality about dominant groups, power dynamics and ideas that new arrivals to a Western country are likely to be expected to assimilate to. These are likely to vary according to the country, the region of the country and the area of work entered. Some working class non-Christians might well find themselves under pressure to assimilate to Christian values should they move to the American “Bible Belt,” for example. However, others entering fields like academia, medicine, social work, art or media may well find themselves under pressure to assimilate to the views of the Critical Social Justice movement.

This last possibility does not seem, in this part of the talk at least, to be one that has occurred either to the man arguing that assimilation to the dominant culture is a good thing or to the people arguing that it is not. It is quite common for Critical Social Justice activists to seem to have failed to notice the extent of the cultural power they have attained in so many powerful institutions or to consider that they could actually be a prominent part of the establishment and status quo at this point. Instead they are more likely to insist that the powerful discourses in society remain that of white supremacy, patriarchy, cis/heteronormativity etc. When asked directly how many job applicants they think are required to write statements affirming their commitment to white supremacy, patriarchy and cis-heteronormativity compared to the number required to affirm their commitment to CSJ concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion, they will commonly argue that the latter is necessary because of all the unconscious bias towards the former. The same response is usually made when asked if there is any equivalent to the 8 billion dollar a year Critical Social Justice training industry.

Perhaps they are correct and the reason that so much time and effort is being spent on having people affirm CSJ beliefs in mainstream institutions and none on teaching them to be white supremacist, patriarchal homophobes is not because the former beliefs have more cultural prestige and the latter are widely regarded (rightly) as socially unacceptable and morally abhorrent. Maybe Western society really is still dominated by racism, sexism and homophobia. Racists, sexists and homophobes do still demonstrably exist and are most observable online, although usually anonymously. We should certainly not stop opposing them, especially with the rise of the conspiratorial far-right developing new reactive forms of white identity politics to augment the old-style racism, advocating hard for rigid gender roles and restricting women’s reproductive freedom and occasionally having difficulty in telling the difference between people indoctrinating children in sexually explicit queer theory and people existing while gay.

I don’t think so, though. While the threat from the conspiratorial far-right should not be underestimated, it is unlikely that these are the views that migrants from non-Western countries to Western countries are going to be pressured to assimilate to. Nor do I think it particularly likely that they are going to find the views that the ‘white race’ is superior to all others, men are superior to women and homosexuality is unacceptable to be commonly expressed ones that they are required to nod along to.

In my experience, (and I admit that there is significant selection bias in my experience), a seriously under-examined form of assimilation pressure that people arriving from countries in Africa, the Middle East and South and East Asia are likely to experience is the pressure to assimilate to Critical Social Justice views. This is particularly common here in the UK where many of the people arriving from countries like India, Nigeria and Pakistan are medical professionals who have been recruited by the NHS. People in the medical profession are particularly likely to be required to write diversity and inclusion statements and attend anti-racist training, gender identity training and “cultural competency” training.

The fact that so much of this comes under ‘cultural competency’ while being completely culturally incompetent is both deeply ironic and depressing. As one Iranian radiologist said to me “It’s not that I necessarily disagree with any of it. I just don’t know what it means.” Queer theory not a big thing in Iran? Who could have guessed? As a Nigerian nephrologist said “In Nigeria, I am so liberal I could get beaten up. Here I am suddenly far-right unless I pretend to believe in all this {critical race & queer theory} stuff?” Another Nigerian nurse who has lived here for long enough to “assimilate” said “It’s still hard though. We don’t do ‘victimhood’ in Nigeria. We get on with things. I have to cringe internally.” A similar comment was made by a Indian GP who struggled not to feel that she was being insulted by communications from the ‘decolonise’ movement which suggested she was undervalued when she was one of two senior GPs overseeing all the others. One charity worker whose organisation addressed loneliness among elderly people in a heavily Caribbean area by arranging meetups told me that people simply stopped coming when new management started including anti-racist content in the meetings. “They come for a cup of tea and a chat with each other, not to listen to young people giving lectures on racism” he said.

Unreasonable pressure to assimilate to a new culture can come in many forms, including expectations that people immediately speak fluent English and learn all social conventions within ten minutes of arriving, stop wearing national dress or speaking about one’s own culture or demonstrating it in any way in order to make friends and get jobs or feeling that one must change one’s name to one more easily pronounceable in one’s new country. These kinds of assimilation demands should all be opposed. But so too should the one where people who come from countries that might be rather more socially conservative than Western ones and where CSJ is not a thing have to pretend to believe in it rather than just agree to codes of non-discriminatory conduct that are already compatible with their own views.