Zadie Smith Quotes

...despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist. But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

Miscegenation, that is race-mixing, is and has always been, the greatest threat to the survival of the Aryan race.

I served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force and currently serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet I still experience people telling me to 'go back' to China or North Korea or Japan. Like many immigrants, I have learned to brush off this racist insult.

We will not allow to become a political issue in this country the question of Asianisation.

If you just compare South Africans to the rest of the world, I think that white South Africans, and especially English-speaking white South Africans, are exactly the same as Brits or Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans.

A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.

Although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears.

I am, as a European, absolutely shocked by European people. I am also shocked by European nationalist people. They have allowed themselves to be so emasculated so silently.

When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland. My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy.

I made some flippant remark about not wanting my son to grow up with an American accent, and the next thing I knew, there were people in America suggesting I head back to Britain if I was unhappy at such a prospect.

We are Americans when we go to war, and when we return, we are Mexicans.

Our brother (many of the Jews of the Middle East) has gone to Europe and to the West [and] come back a Russified Jew, a Polish Jew, a German Jew, an English Jew. He has come back with a totally different conception of things. Western and not Eastern…, coming back with imperialistic ideas, with reactionary or revolutionary ideas… he is not the old cousin, and we do not extend to him a very good welcome

As globalization proceeds, tribalism increases.

This is nothing less than a national tragedy…. It is time to consider these refugees arriving from Poland and elsewhere purely on their merits as migrants and in an unsentimental light. In the last 50 years these people have swarmed all over Europe, coming principally from Armenia, Russia and the Balkans. We should remember that they are European neither by race, standards, nor culture. They are, in fact, an Eastern people. In 2000 years no one but Britain has been successfully able to absorb them, and for the most part they owe loyalty and allegiance to none.

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him.

Efforts to concentrate immigrants in social groups and to retard their Americanization should be steadily frowned down.

There is less and less of France abroad, and more that is foreign in France.

America's Latino immigration deluge is so little like any earlier wave, so hostile or resistant to sharing the common American language, civic rites and virtues upon which our republican self-governance depends, that it constitutes a major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the United States

Integration would lead to miscegenation, which will destroy our white race eventually.

The dangers of inter-mixing and bastardizing of our people are extraordinarily grave. They lie to a great extent in the almost unlimited lack of knowledge throughout our nation of the problems of blood.

People who allow others not of their race to live among them will perish, because the inevitable result of a racial integration is racial inter-breeding which destroys the characteristics and existence of a race

We are a British nation with British characteristics. Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened

I don't think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say 'we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else.’

People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture...