Lenny Abrahamson Quotes

Koreans are worried about the Japanese right-wing people, who tend to be against foreigners. But the Koreans in Japan aren't even foreigners. They are essentially culturally Japanese. If a family has lived in Japan for three generations, it's absurd to see them as foreigners.

I mean, a Mexican boy couldn't be anything else but an Indian. And why did you take the name of Quinn, they used to say to me. Hey, you're an Indian, so I played Indians.

The word 'Chicano' was originally a derisive term from Mexicans to other Mexicans living in the United States.

When I was at school, you had to choose; there was a lot of pressure to assimilate. You were an Aussie, or you were one of 'the wogs' - which was everybody else. But I didn't want to be in either group, so I felt like an odd one out.

I'm Russian Jewish. And I had to grow up really quickly.

Multiculturalism is a white people joke.

What about a white South African who comes here from Africa. Is he an African American?

To the millions of non-Christians who live in this country, “our” culture is not their culture and they have not assimilated Christmas carols. Most people take their religion far too seriously to look upon religious songs as forms of art only. The day “Silent Night” is sung in Buddhist Temples and Jewish Synagogues throughout the United States is the day that “Silent Night” will have been assimilated into “our” culture.”

It isn't pleasant to surrender to the hegemony of a nation which is still wild and primitive, and to concede the absolute superiority of its customs and institutions, science and technology, literature and art. Must one sacrifice so much in the name of the unity of mankind?

Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.

We Muslims in the West, like Jews before us, grapple with the same issues that Jews of the past did: integration or isolation, tradition or reform, intermarriage or intra-marriage.

You can try to justify how Asian you are, but you're never going to make everybody happy.

The fact is, I'm half-British, half-Malaysian. For an Asian who's grown up in America to be commenting on how Asian I am when they've never left America... does that make them more or less Asian than me?

'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.

I am not only a Parsi, I am a Kashmiri too.

I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.

Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.

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.

When I was very young, my background as a Sikh-American made me aware of the tensions that underlie choice.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director. Whether I'm French or Australian or whatever, it's really not important.

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.'

I'm a little bit of everything. Sometimes people think I'm not Puerto Rican, because my name doesn't sound Spanish.

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.