Hunger of Memory: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Rodriguez opens this essay by explaining that he has been the beneficiary of affirmative action. This policy arose in the late 1960s, as a result of agitation by nonwhite Americans to gain more equal access to higher education. He declares that he was wrong to have accepted the label of “minority student.” He writes, “For me there is no way to say [‘minority student’] with grace. I say it rather with irony sharpened by self-pity. I say it with anger.” He recalls the first time he saw the phrase “minority student”: in a college literature class, his professor returned a paper Rodriguez had written with the comment, “Maybe the reason you feel Dickens’s sense of alienation so acutely is because you are a minority student.” Rodriguez remembers the confusion he felt reading this comment: “Never before,” he writes, “had a teacher suggested that my academic performance was linked to my racial identity.” He considers questioning the professor about the comment, but instead he leaves the class silently—thus, he writes, “implicating” himself in the “strange reform movement” of the late 1960s.

Rodriguez provides a brief history of affirmative action. He argues that this policy has its roots in the black civil rights struggle of the late 1960s. The leaders of this movement realized that institutional racism was blocking black students from acceptance to universities, and they advocated for improved access for black students. Rodriguez agrees with the assessment that limited access was a problem, but he argues that these activists “tragically limited the impact of their movement” by defining and addressing the problem “solely in racial terms.” Affirmative action is flawed, Rodriguez argues, because it stands to benefit “those blacks least victimized by racism or any other social oppression—those culturally, if not always economically, of the middle class.” Rodriguez goes on to describe how he initially accepted the label of minority student, even though it made him uneasy, but then he began to realize that his excellent early schooling meant that he wasn’t disadvantaged in the way that other nonwhite students entering university were. By the early 1970s he had realized that he was “not—in a cultural sense—a minority, an alien from public life.” Rodriguez writes: “The reason I was no longer a minority was because I had become a student.”

Rodriguez elaborates on the reasons he thinks affirmative action has been a failed policy. He argues that affirmative action had its roots in the American South, “where racism had been legally enforced, [and therefore] all blacks suffered discrimination uniformly.” He acknowledges that affirmative action has had the positive effect of teaching Americans that “there are forms oppression that touch all levels of society.” However, the downside, he writes, is that this focus on racism has made it “easy to underestimate, even to ignore altogether, the importance of class.” He further explains that he does not doubt, for example, that a black lawyer or businessman experiences racism—but, he writes, “I do not think that all blacks are equally ‘black.’ Surely those uneducated and poor will remain most vulnerable to racism.” Because affirmative action is blind to class distinctions, “those least disadvantaged were helped first, advanced because many others of their race were more disadvantaged.” Rodriguez argues that the more revolutionary (and effective) course of action would have been to focus on reforming primary and secondary schools.

Rodriguez admits that he is guilty of having accepted the benefits of affirmative action, even after speaking out against it. (“I permitted myself to be prized,” he writes.) He writes that he seeks forgiveness—the forgiveness “of those many persons whose absence from higher education permitted me to be classed a minority student.” He doubts, however, that such people will ever read his writing.

Rodriguez further details his argument that affirmative action is only a superficial solution. He writes that, “the academy was prepared to do little more for such [minority] students” beyond admitting them. Universities began accepting students who did not have the tools to succeed in college and, thus, “the conspiracy of kindness became a conspiracy of uncaring.”

Thus far, Rodriguez has been addressing the status of affirmative action in the 1960s. He now shifts to discussing the occurrences of the 1970s—the most significant of which, he writes, was a tendency of nonwhite students to believe that it was possible for them to “[belong] at once to academia and to the society of the disadvantaged.” This is a false premise, Rodriguez argues: “Activists encouraged students to believe that they were in league with the poor when, in actuality, any academic who works with the socially disadvantaged is able to be of benefit to them only because he is culturally different from them.” He uses the example of the word Chicano, which was adopted by Mexican American activists in the 1970s. Among communities of lower-class Mexican Americans, this word was used in an “affectionately vulgar” manner, and was considered offensive when used by strangers. Activists reanimated the word with “pride and political purpose,” turning it into a public word (much to the shock of non-activist Mexican Americans). Thus, Rodriguez writes, the student-activist “taught his listeners to imagine their union with many others like themselves. But the student easily coined the new word because of his very distance from Chicano culture.”

At this point Rodriguez issues a disclaimer: he writes that he is “not the best person to evaluate the Third World Student Movement” he has been describing because his relationship to these “self-proclaimed Chicano students” was a deeply uneasy one. He was envious of their fluent Spanish, for example, yet he “distrusted the implied assertion that their tongue proved their bond to the past, to the poor.” These students, Rodriguez implies, were deluding themselves by thinking that their education had not fundamentally changed them.

Rodriguez was glad to get away from these student-activists, he writes. He went to Britain for a year to study as a Fulbright Scholar and then “rushed to ‘come home’”—only to realize that, even with his parents, he “remained an academic—a kind of anthropologist in the family kitchen.” At this point, Rodriguez accepted a teaching position at Berkeley, where he once again had to “face” minority students. He recalls how a group of Hispanic students once visited his office, requesting that he begin teaching a minority literature class. He tried to convince the students that minority literature doesn’t really exist—“Any novel or play about the lower class will necessarily be alien to the culture it portrays, I rambled.” He recalls that the students looked at him with scorn, and that, from that point onward, he was seen as a comic figure, “a ‘coconut’—someone brown on the outside, white on the inside.” However, many of his fellow faculty members remained convinced that Rodriguez would be able to serve as a counselor to minority students. The reality was, Rodriguez writes, that the students he connected best with were middle-class (presumably white) students. Yet he still received invitations to speak about the problems facing socially disadvantaged people: “I heard myself introduced at conferences as a ‘Chicano intellectual,’” he writes. “(And I stood up.)”

Rodriguez shifts focus to discuss the white student protests that occurred during his years in graduate school. Most of these protests were about American intervention in Southeast Asia (namely the Vietnam War), but white students were also reacting to the decline in value of a college diploma on the job market. Regardless, Rodriguez writes, it was ludicrous for white, middle-class students to play the victim. Though he himself protested the war in Vietnam, he argues that, for too many people, their protest was based on self-pity and that, fundamentally, students had lost sight of the fact that “higher education implie[s] privilege.”

Closing the essay, Rodriguez reflects on the deep uneasiness he began to feel in the mid-1970s as he began to apply to permanent teaching positions post-graduate school. He received countless prestigious offers, but couldn’t shake the feeling that he was only being offered these positions because he was a “minority.” He recalls a pivotal conversation with a fellow graduate student, who was depressed because the only job offer he’d received would require him to move away from his young daughter. When Rodriguez admitted to his colleague that he had, in fact, gotten an offer from Yale but hadn’t made up his mind about it, the colleague replied, “You’re the one who gets all the breaks.” Rodriguez was angered by this comment and found himself defending affirmative action, to his own disgust. The colleague, who was Jewish, dismissed him saying, “There isn’t any way for me to compete with you. Once there were quotas to keep my parents out of schools like Yale. Now there are quotas to get you in. And the effect on me is the same as it was for them.” In this moment, Rodriguez realized that, though he wanted the life of an academic, he had to protest the unfair place the university had become. He declined all the offers he’d received. When he called his parents to inform them, his father, upset, said, “I don’t know why you feel this way. We never had any of the chances before.” Rodriguez writes: “We, he said. But he was wrong. It was he who had never had any chance before.”