Richard Rodriguez Quotes

Los Angeles is a very special city. It's a great ethnic mix, a great cultural mix.

The Hispanic population in this country is not a monolith. When you're in Miami, the newscast is going to be different from the newscast in Los Angeles.

A lot of people don't know this, but Toronto is probably the most multicultural city in North America.

We are a multicultural society in a continuous state of abrasion.

The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city - there's Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there's African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans.

I think we should appreciate ethnicity and diversity, and appreciate the uniqueness of all people, but I don't think we should be ethnocentric. These things are not ultimate.

What I think it's important to recognize in today's world is that all of our societies are multiethnic, multi-religious and multicultural. And that is a positive thing. That's a richness, and also strength. But we also have to recognize that, for those societies to be harmonious, there is a lot of the investment that needs to be made in social cohesion and inclusivity. But the important thing to recognize, and particularly Europe, most of the terrorist attacks are not done by people that came from the outside. They are homegrown.

There's a great variety of people in Washington, but I think because of the great concentration of people in New York, that variety is more visible. You walk the streets and there are people of every color, shape and size, ethnic background, religion, it doesn't matter. It's always present.

For me, diversity whether you think of it as race or gender, it's not a trend, it's a human movement, it's a human feeling, it's a human desire.

I think that America is more diverse than ever before, and is continuing to become more diverse, and our content should and is reflecting that.

I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.

I think diversity for most actors is such a blessing. It's something definitely I've strived for.

Jews are no longer pressed and obliged to fight, hide or deny their Jewishness. What for? No one actually requires today to abandon the idiosyncrasy of some other culture or ethnic tradition. The great achievement of this last period is that we have been slowly, sometimes reluctantly, yet steadily, learning the art of living with differences.

We can no longer oversimplify. We can no longer build lazy and false stereotypes: Americans are like this, Russians are like that, a Jew behaves in such a way, a Negro thinks in a different way. The lazy generalities - 'You know how women are ... Isn't that just like a man?' The world cannot be understood from a single point of view.

The people of America are red, white, black, yellow, and all the shades in between. Their eyes are blue, black, and brown, and all the shades in between. Their hair is straight, curly, kinky, and most of it in between. They are tall and short, slim and fat, athletic and anaemic, and most of them in between. They are the different peoples of the world becoming more and more the "in between." They are a people creating a new bridge of mankind in between the past of narrow nationalistic chauvinism and the horizon of a new mankind--a people of the world. Their face is the face of the future.

New York, it's people. It's grit. It's diversity of people. It's diversity of industry. In L.A. everyone's looking over their shoulder because one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills just walked in. They value the wrong things.

In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.

We could do something set in the 21st century, where I travel around to lots of different places and we talk to different ethnicities and lots of different racial and religious minorities, so it's not just the black-and-white America; it hasn't been that since the '90s.

I think diversity is very key to anybody's resume, and also for your mental well-being.

I consider myself to be blessed. I have a family that is a mix of different religions and different ethnicities. I hope everyone can look beyond the bikini or beyond the whole beauty pageant stereotype of Miss USA, and realize that what I'm doing is more significant than just that. It represents the United States as a country of opportunity, where you can do anything you want to, and ethnicity and religion cannot stop you.

They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.

You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, "My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened." And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked.

I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.

New York is so diverse. When you're on the street or in the subway, you're experiencing more of the diversity of New York.

Our diversity is not something that is on paper. It is the manifestation of our strength. It is not only our identity but also our tradition.