Richard Benjamin Quotes

In the American 'melting pot,' identity politics wants to smash that pot - to bring us back to the Dark Ages, when collaboration was sparse.

I distrust all multiculturalism, liberal or conservative. The Balkans amply demonstrate the perils of Balkanization.

There's no national glue holding us together because somebody put too much pluribus in the unum.

There's the National Organization for Women feminist faction, there's the NAACP liberal African-American faction, there's the La Raza Hispanic faction. They're pitted against each other and it runs so contrary to the E pluribus unum American middle class experience.

In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of class.

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.

We can serve as bridges, we who identify as hyphenated Americans, because we are all global citizens, and that's why being cognizant of our histories is important.

We are threatened by long-unresolved issues between the melting pot of cultures that make up our nation. People are isolated, every day less united, and every day falling deeper into a new level of cultural despair.

During the Blair-Brown decade social concerns - what kind of society we have become - have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

Having more than one legal system running is not a sign of a healthy or inclusive society. It is just one less thing that people have in common.

In this post-post-racial, post-Obama era of resurgent populism and Balkanized identity politics, it really does feel as though it matters - and matters more than anything else - whether you're black or white.

I think we need leadership that can gently and with affection remind us of what we Americans mostly agree upon: civility, kindness, tolerance, humour, et cetera. The current Trump administration seems to thrive on trying to enforce a very odd, fearful agenda, that it tries to disguise in a false garment of fondness for the working-class - despite the fact that its policies seem designed to continue the decades-long habit of marginalizing that group.

The problem is that people are pulling farther apart, rather than make an effort to get back together. There have been remarkable moments that united this country. It makes everyone feel relieved. Then because of economic stress, political shifts, we get wrenched apart again. I think it's cyclical. I am an optimist by nature. There are moments, the period after 9/11, the way we responded. The election of Barack Obama. There are moments where the country felt good about being American. I'm waiting for that to happen again.

Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness.

I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid.

A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.

I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships... the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. ...And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs

A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of government as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by government. Somewhere in between and In gradations is the group that has the sense that gov't exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.

Groupings of people that get together, think things through, come out to plan and so on, like unions or true political organizations, they've disintegrated. And people tend to be atomized - you get down to a society based on social units based on an atom - an atomic element - which is a person and their computer. Not a society that is going to be able to function freely and democratically. The tendency is there; it doesn't have to be, but its something to worry about.

Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

The rich survive and everyone else gets ready to work 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 jobs and what do you get? Blade Runner. Welcome to your science fiction. Your 21st century. I think that's where it goes. The rich get richer and everyone else... the middle class kind of starts dropping lower and lower.

The UK population became, for lack of a better term, Balkanized. And then all of a sudden Sharia mosques started popping up all over the place. And before you knew it, the most popular or frequent male baby name was Mohammed.

I don't see tribalism ever really disappearing entirely. I just think that people are almost hardwired to identify as groups. And that sort of group identity always runs the risk of being chauvinistic.