Bill Rodgers Quotes

More often than not, we think of ourselves as black, white, Asian, or Hispanic pretty much in this country, but the real America is much more than that.

There's a big difference between race and culture. Because racially, I'm an Indian man. Culturally, not at all.

Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization

The fallacies of the Melting Pot theory have also become obvious. Years before the war [WWI] it had become increasingly apparent that the Melting Pot was no longer successfully performing its function; that the American population was losing its homogeneous character; that various nationalities of recent immigrants were forming more and more compact racial "blocs," each bloc tenaciously maintaining its own racial character, customs, and traditions.

I've always seen myself as an all-American kid, you know. You're not just white or black or Asian or Latino. We're in the melting pot of America.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

America is not a melting pot. It is a sizzling cauldron.

We can make the United States a 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity.

Australia has an increasingly multicultural society.

I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.

I'm a half-breed. You know, I'm Puerto Rican and Norwegian from descent, and I grew up, born and raised in New York City, and I stood out amongst my friends in my community. I was very blond-haired, white, and 'Lemonhead' was the name that they gave me.

I remember acting in a school play about the melting pot when I was very little. There was a great big pot onstage. On the other side of the pot was a little girl who had dark hair, and she and I were representing the Italians. And I thought: Is that what an Italian looked like?

I feel like decades ago it was either you're black, white, Asian or Hispanic, or whatever, but today we see more of an acceptance for people with multi-nationalities.

The richness of America is that we are diverse. We're not Sweden. We're not Norway. We are a great American experiment. And as soon as we start trying to forget race or turn our back on race, number one, we don't confront the real racial realities that still persist.

No one tells every white person in this country how to be. No one tells every Hispanic, or Asian or Jewish person in this country how to be. There is no single definition of whiteness or single definition of blackness.

Racial affiliations are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second - and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted

The melting pot was always a tension between difference and sameness.

Assimilation was never the goal of the diverse ethnic groups in America. Inclusion without discomfort is now, and ever will be, the goal.

… mongrel nation

I may be brown on the outside, but on the inside, I'm all American.

I was born in the Eighties, and at that time the idea of having a mixed-race child wasn't welcome. Then I was also an unusual mix nobody was used to seeing. So people weren't very accepting of me in the beginning, but later that changed.

'Yellow Face' marks my summation of multiculturalism.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

I don't know if it's because my father's from Argentina, that I'm the son of an immigrant, I don't know if its because I'm Jewish, but I have always been mindful that the best insights occur when you have some kind of an outsider perspective.

I'm about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover.