Okay, let’s change gears a bit. Now imagine yourself as a tan, brown-eyed, high school teenager from a South-Asian background, surrounded by white people. Chances are, you know a few things about these white people, without actually knowing them personally. You probably know that they’re immoral. They’re immoral because white people have pre-marital sex like it’s no big deal. They also get married for the wrong reasons, like love or whatever. That’s why so many white people are divorced, because they don’t understand relationships, not like you do! You know that marriage and relationships are about two families coming together. Two families from the exact same religious backgrounds and the exact same socio-economic conditions and with similar status in their communities. Marriage is about having children, and then having very little say in how you raise those children because your parents and relatives will shame you if you don’t raise them “right.”

White teenagers hate their parents and have horrible relationships with them, unlike you, who would do anything for your parents and wouldn’t dare utter a negative syllable about them. These white people are also not as ambitious as you are, since you study all day, go for math and science tutoring in the evenings, and always get the highest grades in your classes because you’re expected to make your family proud so they can boast about you to their relatives back home. White people just don’t ‘get you’ because you have big plans in life that have been scrawled in invisible ink all over the walls of your house since you were a child. White people just seem so care-free, they probably don’t really have anything to look forward to in life. You, on the other hand, need to land that six-figure job at Facebook, or get into the top medical college in the country. Man, white people are wasting their lives away with art and music and sports. Like, seriously, who studies history in university?! I’ll tell you who: a white person who wants to be homeless, that’s who!

I’m just barely getting started here, but I think you get an idea of where I’m going with this. Where do these ideas and misplaced opinions come from? Are these really the types of things that immigrants say and think about white people, or anyone not from their own communities? No, not always, but if we’re being honest, this happens more often than we’d like to believe. There are people who, in their ignorance and close-mindedness, formulate these harmful views about Westerners and pass them down to their children, making assimilation and integration into the adopted home country that much harder for the next generation. This has serious consequences in our societies.

At his point, I just want to make a few things clear: I am NOT anti immigration (which would be self-defeating, no?), nor am I racist against my own people. I am not trying to cast immigrants in a negative light, which, again, would just end up putting myself at a disadvantage since I can not mask my own immigrant roots. Having said all this, I also believe that the immigrant silence needs to be broken.

For starters, this is a form of emotional abuse that we are taught is perfectly normal, and even necessary, to prevent our children from “becoming too Westernized”. Universal ideas of freedom and autonomy are great in theory, but honour and family pride end up taking precedence when time comes to take action. Tactics such as blackmailing, instilling fears of abandonment and isolation, and threatening to send the children back to the home country if they don’t comply with the parents’ wishes are often utilized to keep our youth in check. We raise emotionally crippled and dependent children, who don’t hold up very well as adults either. Plagued by fears of failure, of letting down one’s family, denying ourselves what we truly want in life, and suffering from overall low self-esteem, we are barred from even acknowledging that all this is common practice within our communities and cultures.

We assimilate well in the workplace, at school, in society. We learn to follow the laws and dress appropriately and speak clearly in the native language of our new homes. But we don’t assimilate mentally. We never come to fully understand and accept life in this new land. We view the freedoms and opportunities here at an arm’s length, never really striving to achieve them. We view our new home, that accepts us and gives us shelter, as a place where we can only make financial and economic gains, not mental or emotional ones. Even though our families have physically left their countries, we are still caged in that mentality and way of life.