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Summary Of Hunger Of Memory Richard Rodriguez

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In the autobiography Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez the author employs the theme of higher education to defend his views on affirmative action. He shares his views and experiences on the issue as a minority alienated in a majority white American society in the 1960’s-70’s. Although he was a well–educated Mexican American, his ethnicity classified him as a minority. In college, despite being anti-affirmative action, Rodriguez still reaped the benefits of affirmative action. He believed that affirmative action should not be not be determined by race, but student’s intellectual ability to complete college.Affirmative action in his eyes not only discriminated against non-minority, but also gave way for failure due to the lack of proper schooling before post-secondary institutions for minorities. The term minority student means that students were disadvantaged and were underrepresented in America. Richard argues that the people who affirmative action was designed for were not benefiting because affirmative action was not …show more content…

Knowing: I was not disadvantaged like many of the new nonwhite students who were entering college, lacking good early schooling.” (157). He believed that he was solely considered a minority because of he checked the Hispanic box indicating his ethnicity, even though he received a good catholic school education all his life and came from a middle class family in Sacramento California. During this time in his life, Rodriguez realized that he had a strong discomfort at being the beneficiary of affirmative action. His outcry of his true emotions in 1970 resulted in praised by politicians but caused cultural tension between him and the Hispanic community because he pointed out that any lessened ethnicity in college was considered a minority under affirmative action. Richard wanted to point out that not every person associated with an underrepresented race is a

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Richard Rodriguez essay “Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans” reveals Rodriguez’s attitudes towards race and ethnicity as they relate to personal identity. An evidence to support Richard Rodriguez’s claim in this section is when he says “ I am chinese, and that is because I live in a chinese city and because i want to be chinese”. (163-165) This evidence reveals, rodriguez point that ethnicity has nothing to do with race . He says that a person can choose their ethnicity based on the way they want to act and on things they want to be value. Rodriguez got used to the differences and actually started to like them.

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After reading the book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria” written by Beverly Daniel Tatum, I was left wanting more information on process-oriented and goal-oriented equality programs. Tatum quickly visits these two points in roughly two paragraphs, so I sought out other outside resources to better understand the two terms and how they interact with affirmative action. First, affirmative action is described as "any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, adopted to correct or compensate for past or present discrimination or to prevent discrimination from recurring in the future." (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Statement on Affirmative Action, October 1977). In other words, a program

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In section II of chapter two of Hunger of Memory, author Richard Rodriguez speaks in great depth about his love and hate relationship with books and living the life of a scholar. Being that he and his family were middle-class immigrants from Mexico, Rodriguez starts out by expressing the notice he took to his parent’s bilingual abilities in his childhood. Somewhat of a rarity, having both parents from a different country being able to speak at least a small amount of English, young Richard was relentless in the disappointment he showed toward his parent. Often he compared them to his teachers, who seemed to know much more than his mother and father. He knew that “reading was something done out of necessity” for his parents but to his teachers

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“I was learning rapidly how to watch white people, to observe their every move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what we said and what we left unsaid” (Wright 181). Richard uses his observation of whites to guide himself on how to act and react around white people. For example he must agree with the whites even if he truly disagrees. For example he must agree with the whites even if he truly disagrees. “I answered with false heartiness, falling quickly into that nigger-being-a-good-natured-boy-in-the- presence-of-a-white-man pattern, a pattern into which I could now slide easily” (Wright 234).

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