Matt Ortile QUOTES

1 " Unlearning the colonialism I was taught, the stories I've been told and I've told myself, is a daily practice, like learning a new language. You learn it by watching films, listening to the radio, reading books. Your ear gets attuned to it. You pick up the vocabulary, learn the system's grammar and mechanics. From there, you can understand and deconstruct it. Sure, learning a language is a solo task, but it helps to have conversation partners. "

― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

3 " To counter that 'all lives matter' is to dismiss the specificity of antiblack racism, how the gradations of violence inflicted on nonwhite bodies is dependent on the darkness or lightness of our skin. "

― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

5 " Colonization works by cutting off peoples from their own heritage-be it traditions or languages, orthographies or names...They taught us Spanish for the same reason Americans taught us English: to homogenize colonial subjects under one tongue, one fist. ("You're in America," we're told-not only as immigrants to the US but as erstwhile property of the American empire. "Speak English.") "

― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

7 " As Las Islas Filipinas, Spain placed us into castes based on how Spanish one's blood was, colorism by DNA. It's why Filipino pop culture today still puts light-skinned celebrities on a pedestal (just look at our Miss Universe winners.) "

― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

9 " Like most Filipino immigrants I knew, I traded my accent for class anxiety. "

― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

11 " It's a snap judgement, yes. One that saves me the psychic burden of sitting through dinner with a boy who might insist, "But ALL lives matter." It's to optimize the experience, to reduce the friction, to make the slide into a relationship as seamless as possible. "

― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

13 " Sometimes, men who wrote such slurs fucked me anyway, reminding me how racists might make exceptions in the name of conquest. "

― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

15 " The term 'mestizo,' in the Philippines today, refers to mixed race filipinos, often those who have a white parent. the term, and the beauty standards that follow, were passed down to us over three centuries of Spanish colonization. Mestizos dominate the media landscape...In short, Filipinos, myself included, look to lightness to know what to desire. "

― Matt Ortile , The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance

17 " Immigrants and people of color are forged in such fires, shaped by heat and pressure. But in my four years at Vassar, I was chosen to be privileged. As a model student and Asian American, I never risked getting burned. "

― Matt Ortile