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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Author Richard Rodriguez talks about the erotic conundrum of race mixing in America, his strange love for Richard Nixon and why George W. Bush is our first Hispanic president.
Apr 27, 2002 | "Without race, we wouldn't have music, movies, prisons, politics, history, libraries, colleges, private conversations, motives. Dorothy Dandridge. Bill Clinton," writes essayist and journalist Richard Rodriguez in "Brown: The Last Discovery of America." And yet Rodriguez wants nothing more than to undermine race and usher in the idea of a "brown" -- impure, indistinct and contradictory -- America. For Rodriguez, the Catholic gay son of Mexican immigrants, "Only further confusion can save us."
"Confusion" might not be what readers are looking for when trying to make sense out of race and ethnicity. But "Brown," for the most part, is an optimistic, often romantic collection of essays that reflects what's already happening in America: A significant number of Americans define themselves as Hispanic, which, Rodriguez points out, is not a race. Americans continue to melt into each other, despite the census classifications and affirmative action programs that intend to deepen color lines.
"Brown" begins with the essay "The Triad of Alexis de Tocqueville." Rodriguez peels apart the scene from de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" in which an Indian and an African slave care for a white child, Europe's daughter. The memory of this triad hovers over "Brown," each figure shifting periodically to face one of the other two head-on. How will blacks and Hispanics relate to one another, especially now that the government declares that Hispanics are overtaking African-Americans as the country's largest minority? Will this browning of America help African-Americans? "What I want for African Americans is white freedom," Rodriguez writes. "The same as I wanted for myself."
Rodriguez, whose acclaimed memoirs "Hunger for Memory" and "Days of Obligation" are the first two installments in his "trilogy on American public life," spoke to Salon from his home in San Francisco.
Most people might take a look at this book and think you're talking about pigment.
Yes. And Latinos.
But you're talking about "brown" ideas. Can you explain that?
What interests me about the color brown is that it is a color produced by so many colors. It is a fine mess of a color. Initially, I had a sense that most Americans probably regard Hispanics as brown. But my interest was not in the Hispanic part of that observation but in the brown part of it -- what is brown? And it seemed to me that the larger questions about America that the color raised is the fact that we are, all of us, in our various colors, our various hues, melting into each other and creating a brown nation. I tried to write a brown book, that is, brownly, by engaging contradiction and paradox, and rhetorical devices that suggest the way that I experience my own life. That is, for example, as the descendent of a conquistador and the Indian -- as a Hispanic.
Is that what Hispanic means to you?
I love that word "Hispanic" because it introduces a paradox that I live with: I live in an English-speaking world but as a descendent of the Spanish empire. And as a gay Catholic. All these brown facts of my life, I've tried to record in some way, rhetorically, through a brown style.
You mention this tension of being two seemingly contradictory things -- gay and Catholic -- as well as Hispanic. What does this ultimately do for your American identity?
It could lead to a quandary and to a sense of deep confusion. At some level, especially after Sept. 11 when the book was nearly complete, I did have the sense that brown might become a very dangerous color in the future. Osama bin Laden is a brown man in the way that I was trying to describe, not simply in his pigment. He was raised a cosmopolite. There he is in Vanity Fair at the age of 14 with his extended family, standing in front of the Beau-Rivage Hotel in Geneva, speaking French, smiling for the camera. And then two years later we learn that he doesn't want to be that, he wants to be only one thing, in a cave with other men who are exactly like themselves. There are indications throughout the world and in this country too that there are people who will react against their brownness by denying it and by trying to make the crooked line straight within themselves. For that reason, it could be a dangerous time.
But for me, the creativity of the moment is exactly announced by the woman who writes to me and tells me that she is the daughter of a New York Jew and an Iranian Muslim. That there are Jewish Muslims in America strikes me as a very interesting thing and potentially very creative. We're already tasting that on our plate -- Chinese Italian food at some chic SoHo restaurant. But what we are only tasting, we have yet to announce in any formulated way. A woman tells me that she's Korean-African, and then she tells me that's not even the half of it, she's a Baptist Buddhist. I tell that to a theologian friend of mine in Seattle and he says that's impossible. And I said, "But she walks, she exists, and somehow we have yet to hear from her."
