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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
by joslin01 11y ago
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.
- pofjer 11y agoCan't agree more with your last paragraph! Summed up pretty much everything I was trying to say above.
- humanrebar 11y agoThere's a difference between "come as you are" and "come join us". Diversity and assimilation are two different things.
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- pingou 11y agoWell 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.
- joslin01 11y ago+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.
- umanwizard 11y agoExactly -- 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.
- wavefunction 11y agoThere'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.
- wbl 11y agoThe 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.
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- yoz-y 11y agoI 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.
- panglott 11y agoI would say the main problem with Americans is that they really do not like to speak any language other than English ;)
- yoz-y 11y agoMaybe 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.
- nerfhammer 11y agoI've met Germans who said they wished they had only ever learned English and not German.
- yarrel 11y agoGerman is better for philosophy and technical use, except in the edge cases of much longer words IMO. (I'm English.)
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