Michael Emerson Quotes

I think one can live in American society with a certain cultural heritage, whether it's an African heritage or other, European,what have you, and still absorb a great deal of this culture. There is always cultural assimilation.

I would say that Catholics came in and competed with the Protestant work ethic. That is one thing. And they did assimilate into the broader society and a lot of them, especially Irish Catholic did their best to sound like they were English rather than Irish by dropping and the O and the apostrophe.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

It is often not even wise to try to make an American of the best of aliens.

Afro-American

No like Indian school for my people. Indian boy go to Indian school, stay like Indian; go to white school, he like white man. Me want white school so my children get educated like whites.

Historically, postwar black immigrants to Britain were concerned less with preserving their cultural differences than in achieving political equality. The political elite, on the other hand, has been obsessed by the question of cultural difference.

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.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.

You're trying to grow up, and you don't want to be like your parents, and that gets mixed up with being Korean... They brought their values from Korea, and I accepted them because I didn't know anything more. But as I grow older, I feel more Korean every year; it's very strange.

Assimilation, not success, is the American end game.

I've been to so many parties in England and in America that's exactly like that, where you're kind of, like, seen as Other. When you're just living your life, and you have to adopt the Other in order to understand and navigate the society.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

I was raised in a completely black world. In those days, if a white woman married a black man, she lived as a black woman, and that was just the end of it. So, I don't have a feeling of being bi-racial. I don't have a connection to it. People often come up to me thinking I do have a connection to it, and I kind of let them down because I really don't.

I think it's easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that's why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.

You got black people in an all-white country and they don't know nothing about themselves.

If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I'll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I'm in somebody else's homeland. So I'm going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean.

Growing up in America, I never really appreciated my culture. I knew what being Hispanic was, but I thought that since I didn't look Hispanic, I was white.

It's an ironic thing about being an immigrant kid, growing up - 'cause I grew up in the UK and went to a British boarding school and we would go to chapel every Sunday morning. And we'd actually have religious studies and religious studies means Christian studies where you study the Bible.

I did not disregard my culture, if I did, it was the white American culture, and I accepted my true culture, when I accepted Mohammed Ali, because this is a black name, Islam is the black man's religion, and so I would like to say, that I would like to clarify that point that I reclaimed my real culture, and that's being a black man and wearing a black name with a black body, and not a white name, so I would never say that I didn't disown my culture.

The technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living.

Even I, when I was a student in London, often wore Western clothes, and yet I'm the most Indian Indian I know.