“The relatively high speed of the child’s absorption into the new culture can thus create opportunities but also predicaments and tensions.” (Suárez-Orozco, Baolian Qin, Fruja Amthor, 54)

In the chapter on Adolescents from Immigrant Families: Relationships and Adaptation in School, the authors highlighted the surprising result that second- and third-generation immigrants were even less integrated and motivated than those first-generation immigrants. In what they call the “immigrant optimism” factor, the more recent immigrants tend to find more incentive to succeed. Continue reading Occult acculturation →

“Along with the belief that they are in some way foreign, many Asian American youth have internalized the notion that this foreignness makes them inferior to real (i.e., white) Americans. There students hate qualities they understand to be associated with Asianness (i.e., foreignness). In an effort to distance themselves from these stigmatized images, some Asian American youth may reject things that they understand are perceived to be foreign, such as their names or languages.” (Lee, p77)

I always insist that nobody should feel inferior to anyone else, so when reading that many Asian American youth feel inferior to their white peers only because of their identity, I felt sad and disappointed. Some Asian Americans went through a very hard time at school not only because they were not acknowledged by their peers but also because they themselves hated certain parts of them and struggled. I have a good friend who is not really Asian American but moved to America when she’s five, after finishing kindergarten in China. She once shared with me that although she looked outgoing, she had few friends until going to college. With the advantage of speaking fluent English and mandarin, she had no difficulties communicating with either English speakers or mandarin speakers and should have made more friends; however, her American peers didn’t think her as an American because the fact that she was born in China and her “foreign appearance”; her Chinese peers didn’t think her as a Chinese since she behaved more like Americans in many aspects. Consequently, she was not welcomed in either group. Continue reading Be proud of your identity →

“But my teacher motioned me to put my hand down.  As I lowered my head, my spirit followed. I experienced then and on many other occasions what Freire calls “banking” education…Had she allowed me to respond, the teacher could have recognized knowledge production as a shared endeavor and given me the opportunity to avoid the stings of rejection.” Continue reading Constructing Identity as Teachers →

“W.E.B. DuBois famously articulated the challenge of what he termed ‘double consciousness’ – a ‘sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Doucet & Suarez-Orozco, 2006, p.169).

Adolescents are well versed in this “double consciousness,” and I would argue that this probably doesn’t vary much between immigrant and non-immigrant populations.

Continue reading Demystifying Double Conciousness →