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Growing up in rural Tennessee in the 1960's and '70's I saw that more than a few folks didn't care for any people from the North. That seems to have changed over the decades.
It's good to hear that assimilation is happening successfully in small US southern towns but I don't think that's the only places where it's happening successfully. Your example of assimilation doesn't hold up though. Having an acquired accent and liking fishing and barbecue are not examples of assimilation into southern culture, they are practices that immigrants from everywhere in the world bring with them from their original countries to any other country that they go to.
People of all ethnicities/cultures from everywhere in the world can generally pick up the prevailing accents that they hear consistently in any place they go to if they stay there long enough.
There are people in all countries in the world who like fishing as a common, laid back past time or as an occupation and have been doing so for thousands of years.
Barbecue isn't only a southern practice, it's just another name for what is historically the very first invented manner of cooking food starting multiple thousands of years. It's the #1 most common style of cooking food that was first practiced by people world-wide and it's still popular everywhere. There are people in every ethnicity and culture who still do it and have improved their methods of doing it, they just don't all call it by the name barbecue.
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I think you're being too dismissive and grasping at straws in order to prove your point.
You can find commonalities among all peoples of the world but that doesn't necessarily mean they are the same.
When the other poster talked about Indo-Americans and their integration into Southern U.S. culture, I knew exactly what they are talking about. Just look at Bobby Jindal and his family, or Nikki Haley.
Some would disagree about the US not creating an illegals problem. By not sending illegals back but letting them work in an underground economy and doing really nothing about the issue for years and having your agriculture sectors actually rely on them.
I think you're being too dismissive and grasping at straws in order to prove your point.
You can find commonalities among all peoples of the world but that doesn't necessarily mean they are the same.
When the other poster talked about Indo-Americans and their integration into Southern U.S. culture, I knew exactly what they are talking about. Just look at Bobby Jindal and his family, or Nikki Haley.
Jindal and Haley? Do you really think they are examples of integration - or assimilation as the other poster (cBach) termed it?
I don't think they are good examples at all. They're just ordinary southern Americans. They were both southern born, raised up in southern culture, educated in southern schools and employed in southern places of employment. They were born and raised as southerners in the south, it's all they have ever known, so southerners is what they are from day one, they were not integrated into anything and never needed to be integrated.
Both of their parents in both families were already highly educated 'westernized' scientists and educators and what have you before they immigrated to North America, chose to live in the south and then had their children. If anyone in either of those two families was integrated into southern culture I'd say it was Jindal and Haley's parents since they were the ones who immigrated, not their kids who were born and raised in southern culture.
I realize there are nuances between integration and assimilation, but we're still generally talking about a society's ability to absorb newcomers and make them full-fledged members of the "us".
I think you're being too dismissive and grasping at straws in order to prove your point.
You can find commonalities among all peoples of the world but that doesn't necessarily mean they are the same.
When the other poster talked about Indo-Americans and their integration into Southern U.S. culture, I knew exactly what they are talking about. Just look at Bobby Jindal and his family, or Nikki Haley.
Yes, I'm glad you understand what I'm talking about. My Indian friends from the South are virtually identical copies of me but with darker skin tones. One of my friends grew up in Leesville, LA and he is the biggest fanatical Saints fan I've ever seen.
When I went up North the Indians stuck together and had strong Indian accents, ate curry, and didn't seem to want to blend into Northern culture. They couldn't care less about American sports either.
Bobbie Jindal or Nickie Haley are basically Indian Americans that are 100% fully integrated/assimilated into Southern culture. If you just heard their voice and didn't see what they looked like, you would assume they would look like a standard white Southerner. You'll find the same with the Chinese Americans or the Vietnamese Americans in the South.
Listen to the narrator for this Vietnamese American festival in New Orleans. Sounds very American don't you think?
This wouldn't happen in the South, the neighbors would go to that place and tell them to turn it the f$%^ off.
It's not too hard to see a difference here. The South is doing a better job of integrating other cultures than the North and definitely better than Canada. It's as if Canada isn't doing anything at all to try to tell immigrants about what is expected in Canadian culture.
In the South if you are outta line, Bubba with a shotgun will be showing up at your door to tell you "how things are in these parts"... lol
I think it would be terribly boring and stultifying.
Again - Ugh !!!
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
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Personally I think having poutine AND Italian poutine AND spaghetti bolognese is a richer palette of choices, than just poutine AND spaghetti bolognese.
I am pretty sure that Indo-Americans even in the South have brought their own contributions to the places they live. In places where there are enough of them, the ''South'' is a bit different from it once was.
But it's still the South.
I think of the article BruSan posted a few pages ago. About Canadians ''switching'' to different types of cuisine. That's all perfectly fine but I don't get the whole ''yoo-hoo! look at how great and interesting we Canadians are, having phô soup now instead of chicken noodle!''.
Cultural authenticity and also unique fusions of authentic cultures will always be more interesting than simply importing stuff lock, stock and barrel.
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