Politics & Power Quote by Isaac Mizrahi

American television and American food aren’t just guilty pleasures here; they’re nation-building tools. Isaac Mizrahi frames assimilation not as a solemn march toward “belonging,” but as a daily intake: what you watch, what you eat, what you learn to crave. It’s a sly, slightly defiant move from a designer who built a public persona in the 1990s that thrived on taste-making while refusing the usual immigrant-script pieties. He’s naming the banal engines of American identity the way a stylist names garments: not as destiny, but as selection.

The key provocation is in the word “occupied.” It suggests both consumed and taken over, as if the culture did what empires do: it moved in, redecorated the interior, and made itself feel natural. Yet Mizrahi’s punchline turns that takeover into agency: “My ethnicity was my choice.” It’s not a denial of heritage so much as a refusal to be managed by it. He’s rejecting the idea that ethnicity must be authentic, inherited, or properly performed for an audience hungry for “roots.” Instead, he treats it as something closer to personal style: constructed, revised, worn differently depending on the room.

“It still is” updates the thesis for a multicultural marketplace that often sells identity back to you as a fixed brand. Mizrahi insists on the right to keep editing. In a culture that demands both assimilation and “representation,” he claims a third option: self-authorship, even when it’s messy, consumer-driven, and unmistakably American.