The writer Richard Rodriguez is the son of Mexican immigrants who pole-vaulted into the American middle-class. He grew up in Sacramento during the 1950s, was educated at Catholic schools, graduated Stanford and Columbia, and in the early 1970s set to work on a Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature at Berkeley. It was the dawn of affirmative action, and though, he wrote later, “I was not really more socially disadvantaged than the white graduate students in my classes,” affirmative-action officers directed generous grants and prestigious teaching posts his way. This seemed unfair to Rodriguez, and he said so. In a series of essays published in national magazines, he bravely protested. Most beneficiaries of affirmative action, he said, either were like him, and unneedful of the advantage, or they were unprepared for it, products of the inner city often left “illiterate in two languages” by bilingual education.

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