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An engagement with history and the travails of inheritance hovered over this year’s selection with a ghostlike presence, which is no surprise considering the heated state of the country’s various reckonings — with ingrained cultural values about sex and gender that many denounce as patriarchal, for instance, or the clash between the nation’s ideals about assimilationism and its increasingly diverse ethnic makeup.

Harold demonstrates a strain of WASP-y assimilationism that even his younger relatives can't quite get behind, including insisting that everyone embark on a formal fox hunt and then critiquing Marcus for not having the proper number of buttons on his jacket.

Today, assimilationism is at the centre of the concept of nation.

But not all queers were so fervent; many felt marriage amounted to heteronormative assimilationism.

If you reject “assimilationism,” then you can’t suggest, as Obama did, that centuries of racism have eroded the black nuclear family.