Appiah: Well, you know, one of the things about the United States is that it is a country that is very self-consciously diverse now and that's good, but you have to remember that that diversity comes with a great deal of shared American stuff. For example, 99.something percent of Americans understand andhttp://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200602/20060210_appiah.html
speak English. Now in the country I grew up in, in Ghana, there is no language that 99 percent of the people understand. Barely fifty percent of the population can communicate reliably in the government language, which is English. So we think of ourselves as very diverse, but in many ways, we're actually less diverse than we think we are.
What holds the United States together in many senses is the fact that, despite this acceptance of the diversity of identities, people are in fact, you know, remarkably similar. If you come from outside the United States, one of the first things that strikes you, I think, is, on the one hand, they all keep saying how different they are. On the other hand, they all seem, to the outsider, so American.
When Americans go abroad - and this is one of the reasons why I think Americans should go abroad more - one of the things they discover is that people who think of themselves as very different
here - African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans, for example - you put them both down in Nairobi and suddenly they recognize that they have a great deal in common. So it's good, I think, that we accept and celebrate our diversity, but we have to remember that it's sort of within a certain framework.
I'll give you another example. When religions settle in the United States, they tend to become Americans in a certain way. For example, Islam in the United States. The broad majority of Muslims in the United States believe in the separation of
church and state. The broad majority of Muslims in many other countries don't. They think that it would be better to have (unintelligible). Most American Muslims are not after that. They're like most American Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Buddhists. They think it's just fine to have religion be something that you do and make decisions about privately and the government not be religious at all.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Philosophy
On my search for bilingual info, I found this:
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The US model of assimilation is the American Melting Pot where immigrants eventually lose their culture and do become "American" though it may take a few generation. In Canada we strongly believe in the Canadian Mosaic system, where immigrants though they learn the common "Canadian culture" still retain their roots. People mostly refer to themselves as French Canadians, or Italian Canadian, or Lebanese Canadians even when they have been in the country for several generations. Most still speak or at least understand their langague of origin. In Montreal most daycares are billingual and on top of that most kids also have a third language at home.
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