On integration versus assimilation

We come to know who we are as people by contrasting ourselves in the light of those around us. It is not a sudden realization, but the accumulation of gradual bits and pieces of learned knowledge that defines who we are. 

For example, we learn that we are tall because those around us are shorter, and we learn we are not good at basketball because the others can play better. Later, we learn that we are good spellers because we won the spelling bee and bad kissers because our exes say they’ve had better. And so is the case with how we learn most things about ourselves. 

Once we have an idea of who and what we are—the pleasant and unpleasant, average and rare, tall and bad at basketball—we are pressed through a machine that tries to squish out all the unpleasant. I am the machine to you, and you are the machine to me.

This machine, as you may have guessed, is our society. And what it does is not evil, but is rather just done out of habit of encouraging assimilation. 

It happens all the time. We are told to assimilate so as to advance under the radar without being detected. 

My mother has a pet peeve. If we are at the grocery store and the girl ringing us up has a nametag that reads, for example, “Guadeloupe Maria Lopez,” my mother expects to be addressed in Spanish. Guadeloupe will attempt to give us the total in English, but my mother will insist and eventually Guadeloupe will say, “Su total es…” My mother will be satisfied, and we will pack the bags in the car as she says that it could’ve been avoided had Guadeloupe just spoken Spanish in the first place. 

Fine, my mother is a terrible person for profiling, but let’s put that to the side. Sure, it could have been the case that Guadeloupe isn’t from a Spanish-speaking nation, and, sure, maybe she really didn’t know Spanish, but I would be willing to bet that Guadeloupe just doesn’t want to be heard speaking Spanish in a public space. Why? Because we are constantly being told to separate and flee all things that could relate us to adversities we may have had to face. 

And we’ll do just about anything to assimilate. We won’t teach our children the language of their roots. We give them names that are easier to pronounce in English. We pack them lunches that won’t stand out at the lunch table. 

And this isn’t just about ethnicity. 

It’s also about wanting to forget that drunken uncle who hits his wife, that cousin who ended up in prison, the aunt who got knocked up when she was still in high school. 

Any trace of not coming from a perfect background is brushed under the rug and avoided during dinner.

 We are encouraged to erase the appearance of scars, so not only those around us don’t see them, but more importantly, in the hopes that if we don’t see them ourselves, we may begin to forget they were ever even there. 

And that’s the problem. There is a world of difference between assimilation and integration, and we don’t seem to understand that. 

Assimilation is what happens when you mix all the different paint colors in a Crayola kit and end up with a uniform and murky brown. 

Integration is what happens when we chose each color to represent themselves in their own lights. The brown looks best for the tree trunk, the yellow for the sun and the blue for the sky. 

Rather than being ashamed when we are out with our friends and bump into our good-for-nothing relative wearing his McDonald’s uniform, perhaps it would show a bit of character to introduce him to our friends as if he was a normal human being. Hey, maybe we could even ask how his rash is doing, because admitting that we share something with someone who isn’t a cookie-cutter replica of a white-picket-fence upbringing is recognizing value. And recognizing the value in contrast is integration. 

I understand being uncomfortable when our alcoholic sibling is brought up or when our parents’ sloppy divorce is mentioned. We recognize that we have something in common with these people, that at one point in our history, we probably went through something similar. But because we, the lucky ones who actually managed to go undetected, are here now, we fear any flicker of recognition that would attach us to them and cause us to backtrack. 

But submitting to this way of thinking and being is allowing that machine to squish us until we are pancake flat and fully assimilated into a puddle of murky and flat brown when we could choose to act in a way that integrates us all into a contrasting and colorful painting. That is the difference between assimilation and integration.