Assimilation & Identity

“It's Ncuti Gatwa!!” I leapt up from the sofa. On my TV screen is Ncuti Gatwa, a fellow Rwandan on BBC News as the cover of the latest issue of Elle magazine. I blast the volume up to hear the voice of the editor-in-chief of ELLE UK, Kenya Hunt being interviewed on the evening news. “It's who?” My mother mumbles as she skims over the BBC headlines. “Ncu -ti Ga -twa, it's Ncuti Gatwa!” I clap between each syllable. “Oh, he's Rwandan,” she laughs at my pronunciation of his name. I recoiled; my overemphasised claps now seemed exaggerated. “Well, that's how he pronounces it,” I attempt to defend myself. “Ncuti,” she corrects me. And that’s the “Nc” replaced with a soft ‘enschu’ sound, a commonality within the Bantu language group. Mum sighs, “We often simplify our names to make it easier for white people to say, don’t we?” I agreed. We began discussing how we as immigrants, first and second generation alike, adopt ways of adapting to our new place of refuge by approximating to whiteness. So, when work colleagues or teachers begin to pronounce your name, they are comforted by the phonetic familiarity in the vowels of the English “Oh's” and “Ah's.” They don't have to do any of the extra work to pronounce your name correctly. Or worse, they'll come up with a pithy nickname to avoid pronouncing it altogether. And this in no way is a negative reflection on Ncuti, but merely an entryway into a more nuanced exploration of bicultural identity in the absence of constant assimilation. This conversation galvanised my concerns surrounding a loss of one’s identity through immigration, whether it be intentional (assimilation using survival) or subconscious acts of approximating to whiteness. 

My mother immigrated to the UK in 2002, when immigration for asylum was at its highest point in 30 years between 1995-2015 with approximately 95,000 families seeking refuge in Britain. Twenty-four years old and 9 months pregnant navigating her way through a foreign country alone; urged to talk and behave like everyone around her but mocked relentlessly because she undeniably did not. Thus, a coping mechanism formed in attempts to acclimate into a culture that for the most part, was unforgiving. Assimilation by definition is “Integration or incorporation. It is the process by which the characteristics of members of immigrant groups and host societies come to resemble one another.” I understand it to be a self-preservative instinctual method of ‘blending in’ with the intangible punishment of failing to do so being ostracisation. An article detailing migration policy and models of assimilation says, “Immigrants who become ‘racialized’ may find their pathways to assimilation and economic mobility blocked because of racial/ethnic discrimination.” Here, Sociologist Susan K. Brown has identified 2 limitations as a result of racialised ostracisation. The first is through the pathway of ‘assimilation’ being blocked, which tackles a loss of identity as a result of adjusting to the standardised norms of society, i.e. through adopting Westernised nicknames or shying away from our cultural differences, whether it be a conscious effort or subconscious act. The second is through ‘economic mobility’, which refers to a widening wealth disparity that we can see by observing assimilation in the wider context and how ostracisation works to sever this connection between migrants and citizens.

When seeking refuge in a new home that bears no semblance to the life that we’ve always known, adjusting to our surroundings is a priority. And so the things our parents would have done to acclimate are embedded within us as an aforementioned ‘self-preservative’ mechanism. However, it becomes more complicated because as children of immigrants, we’ve likely spent most of our formative years in this foreign country that is no longer ‘foreign’, but ‘home’ and this bi-cultural identity has formed as a result of the core influence of where we’re from ethnically and where we live or are born. Both of these play a part in how we identify but it ultimately is determined by what we as the individual gravitate toward. Therefore, we find ourselves facing both conscious efforts and subconscious acts that prevent us from being ostracised from either community. One of which is the shortening or changing of our names, abiding by the Eurocentric norm, making it easier to pronounce. Or straightening out every last curl before ever leaving the house, layering makeup to thin our noses or widen out our eyes, never letting people visit our homes or avoiding people seeing us eat traditional food. 

I came across a video on TikTok pertaining to internalised racism and the shame that is held by second-generation immigrants. The creator makes a video about her experience as a Teaching Assistant in a secondary school. She explains that the Year 11 class had a guest speaker who was Nigerian and had a strong Igbo accent. The kids mocked his accent, and she was so taken aback that she sat them down, not letting them off so easily. She went on to explain that it is unfathomable to her that they would mock him because most of their parents sounded like him. This is a clear testament to how easy it is for children to detach and suppress the parts of their identity that strike as different from self-preservation to avoid being ‘othered.’ It is a manifestation of the internalised racism we’ve unknowingly suppressed during the primary and embryonic stages of secondary socialisation, where ‘acclimating’ only exacerbates the idea that we should be ashamed of our existing norms, resulting in a shift of behaviour, or assimilation. This admittedly shocked me initially, but not because the kids were unkind. Teenagers are ruthless at this age. But because empathy is an emotion simplified and fed to children at such a young age, and of course it’s normal to constantly remind them of the lessons on morality and what is objectively ‘right and wrong.’ You’d assume that as a result of their parent’s identity being compromised first-hand, they would be more susceptible to this type of taunting which is rooted in internalised racism.

Observing assimilation from a wider standpoint, Nikki Haley, former U.S. Governor of South Carolina and candidate for the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries, was born ‘Nimarata Randhawa.’ This is not surprising in the least when familiar with her politics that aren’t worth mentioning, but suffices to say that ‘simplifying’  her Indian family name as she proceeds to prevail within the right-wing Republican party, is no coincidence. This is to say that we are aware of the components that make up cultural identity and how to manufacture and manipulate these components in order to adjust to certain spaces. This form of code-shifting or switching is common in professional spaces to, say, strengthen one's chances of obtaining a job or success within a given field. But here I argue when does it stop becoming a convenient ‘code switch’ and start to chip away at our identity? As someone who is referred to by my middle name ‘Ashley’  throughout all of my adolescent and adult life, I am entirely guilty of this form of assimilation.

We’ve seen this in instances within the professional setting such as the workplace or school prohibiting ‘unprofessional’ or ‘untamed’ hairstyles that are more often than not, our hair in its natural state. Stemming from misogynoir, bigotry and ‘Laïcité’, or secularism, as quoted by French Education Minister and Prime Minister Gabriel Attal after the banning of hijabs and the abaya. France has had a long history of enforcing secularism in the education system with “a strict ban on religious signs at schools since the 19th Century, including Christian symbols such as large crosses, in an effort to curb any Catholic influence from public education,” Attal reinforces his secularist stance by adding, “When you walk into a classroom, you shouldn’t be able to identify the pupils’ religion just by looking at them.” Here, we’re witnessing the consequences of the refusal to assimilate on a political scale and its effect on legislation, as well as the aforementioned societally exclusionary experience. 

Wider Western society promotes individualism and autonomy until this ‘individualism’ impedes on the secularist, white, elitist standard that we’re indoctrinated into believing is the norm. The individualist ideology has been redefined to reflect a manufactured exclusionary operation through our political, religious and educational institutions that leads to its members acclimating to whiteness and eurocentricity, rather than executing ‘otherness’ until it is no longer deemed ‘other’.

Written by Ashley Zibiza