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Comment by joslin01 | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by the French try to assimilate people more? I'm confused because France is notoriously horrendous to tourists. I've seen polls rate it as the worst place for customer service with tourists and my own brother's experience got him nearly in a fight with some French guys bullying him.

Furthermore, this is just a cultural thing. I'm white and was in a team with a bunch of white engineers that loved cars and things. Our discussions at lunch bored me to tears and I came to realize I had to leave the mega corp to pursue my dreams in the start-up world.

When I arrived at the start-up world, I found people like myself -- people who didn't care so much about things but about ideas and imaginations. I was a lot happier because I found people who thought alike.

It never had anything to do with color and presenting this problem as purely color-based is just being intentionally provocative.

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Well I'm not an expert but it seems to me that in France we expect minorities to leave a good part of their culture and become "real french", eat cheese, wear beret and never walk without a baguette under their arms, whereas in the US I was under the impression that there's a lot more effort from minorities to differentiate themselves. I don't think we can really talk of a "black culture" in France (at least not in the same degree as in the US, but I may be mistaken).

I wasn't talking about tourists, we are well known for behaving badly with them, sorry about that.

What shocks me is not that she doesn't feel she has a lot in common with her colleagues, but that she thinks that it's because she's black and they're not.

+1 I see where you're coming from now. You're right about America and the culture of minorities, but in the melting pot, that's how everyone kind of is. We all feel like we have to be someone in America. It's impossible to just be American since there's really no such thing. The traditional American is a mid-western cowboy and that doesn't really apply to people on either coast.

Exactly -- French people are the "indigenous people" of France. The "indigenous people" where I'm from are the Tohono O'odham. I've never met a Tohono O'odham person, so it's safe to say their impact on culture is minor.

Thus, it's wrong to separate the US into "indigenous" and "foreign" in a way that makes sense in France (where French==indigenous). It's especially wrong to do so and then magically declare that Anglo-Saxons are the "indigenous" group that everyone else should try to be like.

There's no such thing as indigenous French people. Cultures between different regions like Brittany and Provence are quite different. The whole idea of European identities being strongly tied to nationalism and established defined groups is rather silly in my opinion. How about Alsace-Lorraine? German, or French? Belgium, is it Flemish or Walloon? Germany has different cultural regions, especially after the division following WWII. Italians have their own divisions between the North and South and other variations. The Scandinavian countries probably best fit a supposed monolithic national culture but that's changing with recent immigrants. The best that can be said is that language defines the peoples of Europe at this time.

The cowboy only emerges in the 1840's. The New England farmer has been around a lot longer, since the 1600's. And yes, there is a culture of rural New England: things like contra dances, boiled dinners, etc.

America is undisputedly the best country at assimililating immigrants. It comes from doing it for centuries. We are one of the only countries with complete mixed ethnicities and a strong nationality.

But that doesn't really work for blacks because they aren't a different culture, they are a subculture. Their culture has been a part of American culture from the beginning. For almost all of American history they were essentially banned from mainstream culture.

So nobody can make them assimililate. They didn't come here as an immigrant. Their ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved here.

FYI the world thinks France is particularly bad at assimilation. I don't know if that is just a stereotype but that's how it's viewed.

> America is undisputedly the best country at assimililating immigrants. > It comes from doing it for centuries. We are one of the only countries with complete mixed ethnicities > and a strong nationality.

I'll dispute that. In my experience, Brazil is a better melting pot.

Anecdotal example: In Brazil, you don't see people claiming they are Irish when their families have lived in the US for generations.

>Anecdotal example: In Brazil, you don't see people claiming they are Irish when their families have lived in the US for generations.

That is actually the key to Americas success. The total separation of ethnicity and national identity. It allows an immigrant to keep their ethnic identity and merely add an American one.

It's also helps when a white 5th generation american thinks they are Irish and American. They'll be less likely to believe that a newly arrived Mexican isn't really American. They intuitively know you can be both.

That is something we inherited from the British. You can be British and any ethnicity. The US just took that idea and rolled with it.

America's success results largely from its geography. Being isolated from Europe by a large ocean and having the mighty Mississippi river system to build an agricultural powerhouse from made it pretty much inevitable.

I disagree completely, I think that type of attitude leads to the notion of "Real" Americans. Keeping the ethnic identity is the opposite of the melting pot.

In Brazil, you're just Brazilian, regardless of color.

Brazil has a pretty significant and open classism via race issue. Not sure we should hold them up as a superior melting pot...

100% of the Brazilians I have met (I'm in the US) are middle class and above.

Also, as if by magic, 100% of them appear white (or mostly white), despite non-whites making up a large fraction of Brazil's population.

It's absurd to act like everything is great for racial minorities in Brazil.

Except that Brazil is known to be pretty racist, even by Latin American standards. There is, somewhat surprisingly, a lot of racism in Latin America.

Perhaps not, but you have people who honor their US Confederate ancestry after living in Brazil for generations:

http://www.vice.com/read/welcome-to-americana-brazil-0000580...

But I agree that Brazil overall is an impressive melting pot, on par or better than the US.

Canadian disputes this.

At least to Canadians we can point out 'French' Canada. The people are different, but still Canadian.

You really want to hold up Quebec's relationship with Canada as a shining example of good integration?

Not at all. But it seems like a good example of very separate cultures developing in the same nation.

"But that doesn't really work for blacks because they aren't a different culture, they are a subculture"

There you have it. Deep racism.

I think you just misunderstand what "subculture" means. "sub" here has a meaning like "subset", not like "subhuman".

> America is undisputedly the best country at assimililating immigrants. I'll dispute it.

  - Foreign-born US citizens: 14%
  - Foreign-born Australian citizens: 28% (without British, 21%)

Despite all the accusations of racism that Australia gets, we have a far higher proportion of foreign-born citizens than any other western democracy. The country seems to be doing fine.

edit: US is 14%. UK is 12% (as I originally had it). The comparison doesn't really change much, though.

Foreign-born immigrants are recent immigrants. If you change your time frame the results might be different.

If you're born in a country, you're not an immigrant. These people are sometimes called "second-generation immigrants", but they're not actually immigrants themselves. Australia has plenty of those as well (like any postwar new-world Anglo country does)

Still, I'm interested to see how you'd fiddle with the timeframe to make the results functionally different. Show me how you see it being different.

So, your claim to being undisputedly the best is just wrong.

The United States has immensely hateful, mainstream discourse about immigrants. Case in point : Donald Trump. That's one big strike against success claims.

Furthermore, it's not just African-Americans who are other-ised into a distinct grouping. Hispanic immigrants are, to some extent, other-ised into their own cultural subset.

I was shocked when I started going to college in the states, because you can even feel the racial divide in how people eat. There literally are black tables and hispanic tables and jewish tables and white tables.

If you're in the `desired' immigrant groups in the states, for example you are European or East Asian, you won't have much trouble integrating, and nor will you face much prejudice. But if you're not in those `desired' groups, you will not.

Canada, where I'm from, doesn't really have these problems to the same extent at all. We have our own; for instance, we other-ise First Nations groups. But that's pretty much all we other-ise.

Certainly the United States does a pretty good job. Hong Kong, for instance, is horribly behind the USA despite itself doing a decent job. But good != "undisputedly the best".

White/black cultural differences in the US is a different issue from immigrant assimilation. Because black people are already "real Americans", and yet overall are culturally distinct from white Americans in some ways.

You keep talking about "Blacks" vs. "real Americans" as though "real American" is defined as "belonging to White culture".

Blacks in the US are not a "less-American" minority. US culture is multipolar. Why would Blacks assimilate to White culture? Why not Whites assimilate to Black culture? To me this sounds like saying Europe is bad at integrating minorities because French people haven't become German or English yet.

A big difference is that Blacks have been in the US for hundreds of years, whereas they have only been in France in large numbers since after the war.

> To me this sounds like saying Europe is bad at integrating minorities because French people haven't become German or English yet.

That's actually an interesting comparison to the states. The US has a lot of the regional cultures thing going on as well.

I would say the main problem with French is that they really do not like to speak any other language than French. It is quite common that, for example, during the lunch with international participation and a French majority the conversation will start in English but then very quickly slip into French and then foreigners are lost.

It has also happened to me, when speaking English or being in non-french speaking groups, to have drive-by strangers coming up and yelling at us to speak French.

I would say the main problem with Americans is that they really do not like to speak any language other than English ;)

Maybe some precisions are necessary. I am neither French nor American and I can speak French very well. However many of my colleagues did not and since they came to France for short periods of time (1 to 2 years) they did not have much incentive to learn the language.

I think that when you have many non-French speakers in the workforce (this was a research laboratory with a healthy influx of foreign students, postdocs and engineers) then it would be rather nice for the native speakers to speak the 'common' language everybody knows. Otherwise the groups get divided into foreigners and French.

The comments by passersby are quite infuriating as well. When my wife's parents were visiting (not French either) and were talking among themselves we got some angry dude that started ranting (and shouting so that they couldn't even hear each other) about how everybody should speak French. Of course this is an isolated case but still.

I've met Germans who said they wished they had only ever learned English and not German.

German is better for philosophy and technical use, except in the edge cases of much longer words IMO. (I'm English.)

This is a discredited line of thinking among professional/academic linguists.

In the modern understanding, languages become able to express ideas when their speech communities need to express those ideas.

Why's that a problem? English is the global standard lingua franca. English-speaking people in America only need to learn other languages as a hobby, or if they have a specific interest in a particular country.

BTW, I don't think there's any moral reason why English should be the global language, but it is. I speak French too, and if the global language magically became French tomorrow, I would feel perfectly fine.

There is the hypothesis that because we think in language, the structures of languages limit and shape our thoughts. Perhaps there are thoughts that are much easier to have in a language other than english, and Americans tend not to have them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

That would explain a lot of crazy ideas that the rest of world thinks of.

It's not about desire, but about practicality. It would take me a 10 hour drive to find somewhere where there is a significant population of "non-native" English speakers. I'm talking about Montreal, and that's the best attempt at comparison that I can make. Hop on a train in London and you're in Paris in 2.5 hours. Rent a car from there, drive 5 hours and you're in Frankfurt. You've hit 2 new languages in less time than it's taken me to find "1".

My mother is from Belgium and can barely speak french now after living here for 40 years. It's simply because the only practice she ever gets is the hour she spends on the phone with her aunt every couple of months. Unless I move, learning a language is just like any other hobby, only more impractical. I'd rather learn a new instrument to play every day than learn a new language to use once every 5 years.

There's a difference between "come as you are" and "come join us". Diversity and assimilation are two different things.

Can't agree more with your last paragraph! Summed up pretty much everything I was trying to say above.

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