Immigrant shame and the brain

What does immigrant shame do to our self-confidence and our brains? How do we teach our children not to feel immigrant shame?

Did you ever feel immigrant shame? During a time when I was five I stopped responding to my parents in Bengali after one of my friends had asked why I spoke that strange tongue. In school, I just wanted to blend in with my ethnically Swedish classmates. I was ashamed of the smell of curry that oozed out from my jacket because my parents had been cooking the evening before. When my teacher asked me what English poetry I read, I mentioned the Sonnets of Shakespeare and not the poems by Tagore. But at some point in my early teens, I suddenly started devouring Indian diaspora literature, and I started dreaming of the time when I would be going back to see my relatives in Calcutta. What does immigrant shame do to our self-confidence and our brains? How do we teach our children not to feel immigrant shame? Join BrainAwareness GBG for our next discussion on the 20th of September at 5 p.m. CEST. The link will be posted on https://brainawareness.se.