# Quote — Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

> Courses were offered in such fields as nineteenth-century black history and Hispanic-American folk art. The activists made a peculiar claim for these classes. They insisted that the courses would alleviate the cultural anxiety of nonwhite students by permitting them to stay in touch with their home culture. The perspective gained in the classroom or the library does indeed permit an academic to draw nearer to and understand better the culture of the alien poor. But the academic is brought closer to lower-class culture because of his very distance from it. Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly.

- Author: [Richard Rodriguez](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez.md)
- Book: [Hunger of Memory](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/hunger-of-memory.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Hunger_of_Memory:_The_Education_of_Richard_Rodriguez_(1982)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/hunger-of-memory/courses-were-offered

## More from this book

> Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/hunger-of-memory/of-all-the.md)

> An Hispanic-American writer tells me, ‘I will never give up my family language; I would as soon give up my soul.’ Thus he holds to his chest a skein of words, as though it were the source of his family ties. He credits to language what he should credit to family members. A convenient mistake. For as long as he holds on to words, he can ignore how much else has changed in his life.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/hunger-of-memory/an-hispanic-american-writer.md)

> If I ask questions about religion that my grandparents didn’t ask, it is not because I am intellectually advanced. I wonder about the existence of God because, unlike my grandparents, I live much of my day in a secular city where I do not measure the hours with the tolling bells of a church.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/hunger-of-memory/if-i-ask.md)