Michael Emerson Quotes

Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization

I'd say it's even harder to cater to Hispanics than to the lesbian or gay community. We're so culturally separated: Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Venezuelans. We're all so different.

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.

I always felt I was living in two worlds. One was the Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and kids in the neighbourhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was ethnically mixed.

America's Latino immigration deluge is so little like any earlier wave, so hostile or resistant to sharing the common American language, civic rites and virtues upon which our republican self-governance depends, that it constitutes a major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the United States

Integration would lead to miscegenation, which will destroy our white race eventually.

Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn't come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I'm not saying that there aren't prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word 'miscegenation' is not something that we think of.

There's so many Chinese or Asian Americans that were either born in another country like I was and raised in America or born in America and raised in America. They're normal Americans, and they just happen to have a different heritage.

Asian-Americans, we're not a monolithic group. There might be some Asians who are second-generation, third-generation, who may not speak the language that their parents or their grandparents spoke.

Yes, I have an Australian wife; she is half Bengali, half British.

I almost never do anything for Black History Month, because I feel it's just another way to separate us.

You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was, like, big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice. And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was - it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship.

All my friends were black and Mexican. I was the only white kid in our group and had to work hard to be accepted. Year after year, we'd breakdance and we all became close and they labeled me "Vanilla" - like "Hey, Vanilla" and they knew I hated it, so of course they kept calling me it.

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.

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.

I'd like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me.

Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community.

Almost 20 percent of the people living in Germany today have a foreign background. The problem is that Germany can't really offer foreigners an identity because the Germans hardly have a national identity themselves. That is certainly a result of Auschwitz.

A person who speaks good English in New York sounds like a foreigner.

Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.

In Montreal, where I taught in 1970, I met many people. The only ones who said to me they were Canadians, were Jews. All the rest were Scotts, Irish, English, French, Swedes.

I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.

Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!

When well-qualified, upper middle-class blacks or Latinos or Asians move to predominantly white neighborhoods, there's what's called the tipping point. That tipping point is generally 15 percent; at 15 percent you begin to see white flight.

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.