Gregory Rodriguez: All Related Content

Remember when your high school teachers tried to give their lessons more urgency by repeating the old adage that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it? Well, those days are over, or at least they should be. That's because in today's hyper-connected world, oblivion and forgetting are no longer options. The much greater danger today is our postmodern penchant to watch, replay, fixate and fetishize history even as it's happening.

The economic sky might be falling, but here I am at Starbucks in Koreatown fretting over the death of the cafe. Really. Last Sunday’s New York Times had a story about the decline of traditional cafes and bars in France – there were 200,000 in 1960 and today there are only 41,500 – and it made my heart sink. I mean, if the French are losing the art of sitting around in public doing nothing together, what hope do we Calvinistic Americans have?

The chattering classes on the post-racial right say Barack Obama's win is one more nail in the coffin of affirmative action. It proves blacks are equal, they say, and therefore they don't need "special considerations" anymore. Abigail Thernstrom wrote it in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

Maybe they're right, and gays' attack on blacks for voting to ban gay marriage is the proof. Since when have blacks been the target of left-wing opprobrium about the way they vote? At least since Obama was elected president.

"The tenor of the Republican party's rhetoric (on immigration) was clearly a turnoff," said Gregory Rodriguez, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. "We know the electorate will become increasingly nonwhite. Presumably Republicans will go back to trying to be 'big tent' Republicans, because if they want to resurrect the party, they can't be the white party." LINK

Americans like a little cockiness. We implicitly know that you've got to act like a winner to be a winner; you've got to fake it to make it. In our market-driven worldview, we tend to think that we're all pretty much worth what we say we're worth. Anyone who's ever been on a date or worked in retail knows that a little bravado can go a long way. I'm not talking about tacky post-touchdown victory dances, but more on the level of self-assured pride and confidence. Think Gary Cooper.

Tavis Smiley: Let me start by asking you, Gregory, whether or not, that said, the format tonight made a difference in the performance of either man? A conversation heretofore about the format playing best to John McCain. Let's talk about the format first.

For all her talents and accomplishments, it is clear that Sarah Palin became the Republican vice presidential candidate more on the merits of who she is and where she came from -- an identity that is partly real and surely carefully constructed -- rather than on what she has done or promises to do. The same can be said to a lesser extent for the other hit persona of the season, Barack Obama -- at the least, he ran his own successful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Don't do it. Don't tune in to this year's political conventions.

Ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of the nation’s population in a little more than a generation, according to new Census Bureau projections, a transformation that is occurring faster than anticipated just a few years ago.

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050...

SHANGHAI -- "Most of them are so superbly ugly that they're exciting." That's what Qingyun Ma, dean of the architecture school at USC, told me last Tuesday afternoon when I asked him what he thought of this city's remarkable explosion of skyscrapers.

We were in a taxi heading east on the elevated Yan'an Highway, in the heart of the city, continuing a conversation we had started an hour earlier in a conference room at the architecture firm he runs here in the French Concession neighborhood.

A Barack Obama presidency could end the Iraq war, transform our national energy policy, revive America's standing in the world -- but please don't expect the first black man in the Oval Office to move us above and beyond the civil rights era. At least that's what Obama himself suggested last Monday in his speech to the NAACP. In a campaign fueled by high expectations, Obama seemed to be trying to lower his audience's hopes that the election of the first black president would be anything more than a symbolic milestone.

"They are totally new Latinos in the mixture of Latinos in America," says author and Latino culture specialist Gregory Rodriguez, a Los Angeles-based fellow of the New America Foundation. "Their reason for immigrating was less economic than political. They are also more urbanized than Mexican immigrants, Salvadorans especially, and have established themselves institutionally more quickly than Mexicans.