Philip Charles Durham Quotes

More than any other institution in American life, the public schools have broken down the barriers of class, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, language and disability status that separate people.

We are, at almost every point of our day, immersed in cultural diversity: faces, clothes, smells, attitudes, values, traditions, behaviours, beliefs, rituals.

The Hispanic population in this country is not a monolith. When you're in Miami, the newscast is going to be different from the newscast in Los Angeles.

I don't think France is a racist country, I really don't, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there's a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.

I think if you live in London, it's such a cosmopolitan city; nobody even notices different-race relationships. I assumed it would be even more liberal in the States, and it's totally the opposite.

It always trips me out that America, the most powerful and magnificent nation in the history of the world, whose might was built by immigrants from all over the world, only speaks one language.

Make no mistake. Canada is not a bilingual country. In fact it is less bilingual today than it has ever been.

It's not just we Italians who are caught up in the difficulty.

The richness of America is that we are diverse. We're not Sweden. We're not Norway. We are a great American experiment. And as soon as we start trying to forget race or turn our back on race, number one, we don't confront the real racial realities that still persist.

True Americanism is opposed utterly to any political divisions resting on race and religion. To the race or to the sect, which as such attempts to take possession of the politics or the public education of the country, true Americanism says, Hands off!

If the power exists in the present case it cannot be restricted to this alone. The Committee may distribute all the children into classes, according to mere discretion. They may establish a separate school for Irish or Germans… They may separate Catholics from Protestants … separate different sects of Protestants … establish a separate school for the rich, that the delicate taste of this favored class may not be offended by the humble garments of the poor … All this, and much more, can be done in the exercise of that high-handed power which makes a discrimination on account of race or color

The sheltering of upper income children in private schools not only accelerates the deterioration of public education, it hides its consequences from precisely those people who could do something about it.

Canada was conceived of by men of two different equally rich cultures, of two distinctive communities. Bilingualism and biculturalism are facts of Canadian life and should not be hidden or avoided. They're important, even vital to Canada as a nation, but they’re assets, not liabilities, positive factors, not negative ones.

There are men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there upon the [Hudson] river.

We still have two separate public school systems in this country. It’s not [any longer] based on race; it’s based on economics, but that’s related to race.

Racial lines, which once were bitterly real, now serve nothing more than marking out a living mosaic of human beings. And even here men of the same color are like the ivory keys of one instrument where each resembles all the rest, yet varies from them in pitch and quality of voice.

We’ve gone down the road of multiculturalism, which ostensibly says that all minorities have equal status to the majority, The result has been that we have handed minorities a stick with which to beat the majority.

So far as one can generalize, the most gracious, cultivated, and innovative people in this country are French Canadians. Certainly they have given us the most exciting politicians of our time: Trudeau, Levesque. Without them, Canada would be an exceedingly boring and greatly diminished place

Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and of the bush on the other

We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: ‘Good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it.’

Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens - it is an imposition on the state.

the Americanizing tasks of the public schools have passed into other hands, in part because the overwhelming majority of Americans are native-born and do not need to be 'Americanized.' As well, recent multicultural understandings of what is 'American' no longer enables the possibility of the homogenized Americanization of the past. The rise of the mass media (TV, radio, movies) has provided a set of far more powerful socialization and acculturation tools which 'Americanize' in their own way in a manner that has far greater influence than the public school and which is not only accessible to everyone but sought by everyone.

It will not do to say we are too poor to educate the people--we are too poor not to educate them

Tomorrow everybody--or practically everybody--will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday.

Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization