Assimilation or Acculturation?

One thing that I think we need to do is to make people aware that there is a huge difference between the two. In fact, these are opposite, and opposing concepts.

John Savage has put up an excellent post this morning which is the primary inspiration for this post...

In reading John's post, two things were brought to mind, as I said in my comments to the entry:

1. Linda Chavez's statements in the recent FrontPage symposium on immigration and assimilation. And,

2. One of Lawrence Auster's recent entries over at VFR where in his concluding sentence to the initial entry, Auster reveals what a friend of his said to him while discussing the matter of the Muslim immigrants in our country. From memory, Auster's friend said that the Muslims were/are acculturating Americans to their customs in preparation for their ultimate takeover of America.

And here is where the rubber meets the road with regard to the difference between assimilation and acculturation. Assimilation means that the immigrants reject the culture of their homeland and adopt the culture of their new home. Acculturation means the very opposite; the host country and culture adapts itself to the cultural characteristics of the migrants. This is what multiculturalism does. It can't not destroy Western and American culture.

What Chavez and her ilk are talking about when they say that immigrants assimilate naturally, is not assimilation at all. It is, to the contrary, acculturation of Western and American culture to alien cultures. What Chavez fails to recognize (for whatever reason) is that American culture has already been turned on its head due to multiculturalism's demand that we acculturate, rather than that the aliens assimilate.

End of initial post.