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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
And so is that why you say that the ability to talk about miscegenation is such a freedom, or so important?
In America, we have never been candid about the force of eroticism in our history. Maybe because our whole endeavor was individualistic and not communal. Latin America, by comparison, for all of its races -- racism in some ways is more intense there than I've experienced in America -- has always had a vocabulary for the various possibilities that exist when people meet and create children that have never existed before. But in the United States, Halle Berry wins the Academy Award and we're not able to say, to this day, that she is a mulatto, which Latin Americans would say quite plainly. There is this reticence and when someone breaks out of that, like Tiger Woods, for example, there is this sense that he is trying to deny or avoid something. The Latinization of the United States, which is proceeding, is going to come in this way -- toward a more playful and vivid notion of brown.
But all this resistance goes back to the one-drop-of-blood rule of racial identity, doesn't it?
Yes, the great scar and great guilt of America was slavery. The profound struggle of African-Americans to overcome the original sin of this country was always written within this black-and-white dialectic. Obviously, the one-drop theory was a part of this -- who was an African-American? -- in a country where people were beginning to melt. The absurd Jim Crow notion that if you had one drop of African blood you were black -- what that did for those of us who were not African, but were brown, was very peculiar.
What do you mean?
The whole experience of growing up brown in this country, where one felt this incredible sense of irrelevance. That little ditty that I used to hear as a boy -- "If you're white, you're all right, if you're black, stand back, if you're brown, stick around" -- at once you were completely free because you were outside the main conversation of America, but you were also irrelevant to it.
I remember playing with my cousin, whose father was from India and mother was from Mexico, about what she was. We decided one day -- we were children -- that she was an Indian Indian. That was the beginning of my knowledge that there weren't names for what was coming, this new brown meltdown.
And when you were young, you looked to black writers for a sense of identity. Or what were you looking for?
Fundamentally, I was looking for an understanding of myself, but as an American, which is to say I was looking for the most profound story of America. It seemed to me that within the struggle of African-Americans to secure their full freedom in this country, every one of us was implicated. I know some people have found it odd that at an early age I was preoccupied by not Mexican writers, but with the struggle of African-Americans. But there it was. It was the great story of my generation.
Ultimately, it implicated me because the strategies for alleviating the effects of anti-black racism in this country -- namely, affirmative action -- were extended to people who were not black and to me, a so-called Hispanic, in the 1970s. I became a beneficiary of all that, of all that suffering, of all the demonstrations, of the water hoses and of the bulldogs, and the violence of those years and the determination of a people to stand straight. I, brown Richard Rodriguez, son of Latin America, became the beneficiary of all that, which is the irony of my life.
And obviously you've had a problem with this for some time.
I left the university over the issue of affirmative action and I've always felt deeply ambivalent about that because I don't qualify in any way as someone who was the primary victim of racial discrimination in this country.
How do you mean?
I wasn't. I had a very light-skinned father who looked more European than not. My mother is more Indian-looking. But at a very early age in Sacramento when the family became middle class, we were invited not to be Mexican. The neighbors would start insisting to us that we were Spanish. My mother would always say, "No, no, we're Mexican." But in many ways it was clear to us that we were given a way out. In no sense was I held back by discrimination. I just wasn't.
So why do you believe that it's irresponsible for the federal government and the media to keep saying that Hispanics are replacing blacks as the largest minority in America?
It's not only irresponsible. It's outrageous. It seems to me that we do not replace African-Americans. I owe my existence to African-Americans. I mean that literally. I owe the fact that I have this voice, this determination and this confidence in America to their story, to their lives, to their voices. There is no one who speaks American English who is not indebted to the cadence of their voices. The notion that I replace them is ludicrous. And the notion that one group, which is based on ethnicity, Hispanics, replaces a group that is based on blood or race, African-Americans, is really oranges and apples. It is profoundly disturbing to me that we so misunderstand A) the long heritage of African-Americans and B) the ultimate significance of Spanish in this country, which will be not racial but ethnic.
