POL assignment 1

Assignment Due 9/17: Choose a quote from Bourne and write it out in your blog. Under that write your interpretation of what you think the author is trying to say and explain that. Then, after that write out your own explanation of the meaning of this passage and why you chose this specific quote and how it relates to this class.

"These people were not mere arrivals from the same family, to be welcomed as understood and long-loved, but strangers to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of settling down had to take place. For they brought with them their national and racial characters, and each new national quota had to wear slowly away the contempt with which its mere alienness got itself greeted. Each had to make its way slowly from the lowest strata of unskilled labor up to a level where it satisfied the accredited norms of social success."

I think Bourne is trying to say that when people came from different other parts of the world to america the people who set the social standard as to what america was judged the newcomers to harshly instead of taking them as they were. All of these people brought with them piece of their homeland same as the first Americans did but they forgot about that and instead judged them accordingly not realizing just as they had to work their ways back up to being accredited in this new social environment these newcomers had to do the same. These newcomers to america had only minimal skills and had to educate them selves and re brand them selves to fit in with Americans.

I chose this quote because it was one of the more meaningful of the essay there are other similar quotes to this one in the essay I could of picked but I like this one because it has more of a summary of the entire essay in such a small passage its's basically about the adjustment of newcomers to a society established by people who only recently established a society. I think this relates to the class because this class is about the american political system and society and its roles need to be established before a political system can be established so its almost like an underlying root.