Quote

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

Richard Rodriguez

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Rodriguez
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: July 31
Journalist
Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Writing
Undermining
Hopes
Notion
Race
Write
America

More quotes by Richard Rodriguez

Image
After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high schools. Merced is becoming majority Mexican and Cambodian. They may be fighting in gangs right now, but I bet they are also learning each other's language.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
In Sacramento, my brown was not halfway between black and white. On the leafy streets, on the east side of town, where my family lived, where Asians did not live, where Negroes did not live, my family's Mexican shades passed as various.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this diversity claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
The popular idea of a role model implies that an adult's influence on a child is primarily occupational, and that all a black child needs is to see a black doctor, and then this child will think, Oh, I can become a doctor too.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I don't deny people their fantasy life, but I do think that we desperately need to start realizing just how complicated our reality is in America. Sitcoms just don't show us that.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
Learning can cause social fracture. Your people start expressing themselves.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
But America isn't a country of family values Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico is fifteen. Mexico is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and wandering around Tijuana looking for a job, for a date, for something to put on her face to take care of the acne.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy white time. Brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides. You take the rest — my cue to wander away to the sidelines, to wander away.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
What really terrifies Americans is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
When a society doesn't know what to do with its young, it's in real trouble. When the young don't know what to do with society - at the very least, revolutions start there.
Richard Rodriguez