As a Somali girl passed by, struggling proudly with a flag three times her height, followed by a Sikh boy in authentic bunad, it was all I could do to suppress a full-blown, snotting meltdown. It wasn’t just the fact of their ethnicity that had so touched me, but that the Somali, Turkish, Iraqi, and Pakistani kids had committed just as fully to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic as their “pure” Norwegian peers. They, too, were proudly, unselfconsciously dressed up in their Hobbit Sunday best. And it doesn’t get much more assimilated than that.
