Reflection On 'none Of This Is Fair'

In “None of This is Fair” was a well-written article by Richard Rodriguez, describing the issues he has encountered with his ethnicity. He bases his comparison on Mexican Americans, which are also called Chicanos, against themselves and other races. In the article, his thesis states, “The disadvantages of others permitted my promotion; the absence of many Mexican-Americans from academic life allowed my designation as a “minority student”.’ He then describes how many Mexican-Americans did not seek after an education which allowed the ones who did to be treated differently and able to find many good jobs easy due to the fact jobs could increase their diversity among their staff.

In a part of the article, Rodriguez’s professor went up to him and yelled him for acting like every other minority student he had known which struggles to succeed but when their goal was close the got scared and let the opportunity pass. Rodriguez did not respond to his professor since he didn’t want to admit the reason to himself or to his professor why he put off applying to different schools. But the reason was that he was wary of the benefits that the Affirmative Action programs provided to him and that he feared his inevitable success applying for the teaching positions. But he told his professor he would write to several schools. After a couple of days, he had many schools get back to him by either telegrams or phone calls. All a sudden a blur of interviews and airplane trips consumed the next few days. He often thought if he had an advantage over other applicants because of his ethnicity and even asked some schools at the end of the interview. Schools almost bribed him to teach at their school but he kept them all waiting while he made his mind up which was a rather difficult decision for him.

In Rodriguez’s article, he talks about another guy he was going to school with and he was an honor student and academically just as good as Rodriguez but that kid had not receive as much as one job offer back. It was much harder for him to find a job but the only difference between the two was one was a Jew and one was a Chicanos. They had even applied to the same school, Yale, though Rodriguez had an offer and the other kid had not even heard back from them. He eventually got one offer he had to take though it would separate him from his young daughter. After Rodriguez’s conversation with that kid, it helped him come to an immediate conclusion which came with relief. He knew at that moment he wanted to reject all his job offers because he knew it was the right thing to do since the programs helping different races were unfair to white students who didn’t have the extra help or the confidence “to assume their right to a good education”. Which were not simply the Mexican-Americans but also the white, black, brown, or even poor that had been silent.