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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Is this because we look at groups simply in terms of numbers and population without being sensitive to what "minority" implies?
Yes, that's exactly right. We've only used the term "minority" in a numerical way. I become a minority when I get a job at a newspaper because I am numerically underrepresented, but no one ever asks whether I'm a minority culturally, that is, do I see myself or do I feel myself culturally to be in a minority within the society that I live in? That difference made it possible for middle-class nonwhites in this country to advance as minorities numerically, when they were not cultural minorities. It really fudged the issue; not only did the middle class advance on the backs of the poor, but also we've allowed ourselves to ignore the situation of poor whites because they are not numerical minorities. They are in some sense represented in the New York Times or in the White House, but I keep saying to people, "In what ways are Appalachian whites represented in the New York Times?"
How can we avoid this, though? You acknowledge that race is at the center of everything in America. You want to move beyond race entirely then?
Oh yes, I intend to undermine race with this book.
Is that possible? Or are we already in the process of doing that?
Well, here we are, 36 million Americans who describe ourselves outside of a racial category. We describe ourselves as Hispanic or Latinos. That is not a race. When my mother watches Spanish-language television like Telemundo, she watches a show called "Cristina." There's this blond woman Cristina in Miami with her audience and we see there are blacks in the audience and whites in the audience and brown people of various mixtures in the audience. And my mother says, "Son Latinos" ["They are Latinos"]. She doesn't say, "Oh there's a black man and there's a white woman." By virtue of the culture -- which is to say the language in this case -- she identifies them as all belonging to this term called "Latino" or "Hispanic." That is radical. And no one has really understood the effect that has on so many people. Sammy Sosa is as legitimately Hispanic as Madonna's daughter, and in that sense we are undermining the whole notion of race in America.
In "Brown," you say that, historically, whites define themselves against their perception of black identity. How do whites define themselves in relationship to the idea of the Indian, or a brown person?
It seems to me that whiteness became a kind of freedom, and a kind of emptiness too. A woman called me yesterday when I was on a talk radio show -- she lived in Canada and now lives in the United States -- and she said when she was in Canada, she had an identity. She was Irish, Danish. Now she's come to the United States and she's only white. She has no identity. She's a blank slate. And I told her that that's a kind of freedom. What I hope for African-Americans, as indeed for myself, is the white freedom to play black music, or to eat Mexican food, or to leave one's ancestry behind in New Jersey, to do whatever you want in America. Blacks never had that kind of freedom and it seemed to me there was always this restriction of the black that has now become in some sense self-imposed.
I was just going to bring that up. That's quite a barrier to moving beyond race.
Yes, African-Americans, for example, criticize each other for straying too far from what is acceptable. I've heard teenagers do this to each other -- "You're talking white."
As far as the Indian ... it seems that within that original triad, the Indian represented the elusive figure for the so-called white. The figure of wildness. Appropriately so, when the mythology also assumed that the Indian was dead and, therefore, in some sense, the white men replaced him. Forget the fact that Indians are very much alive in this country and that a lot of them are coming from Latin America speaking Spanish. But within that mythology there was a sense that to be part Indian -- even Bill Clinton claims to be one-sixth Indian -- was never the same problem, rhetorically, that being part African would have been. The connection to the land and entitlement to one's place in America ... the Indian really had a different station within the whole romance of America. To belong to that was to claim some part of the land.
How do you see blacks and browns interacting with each other in this triad?
We're in furious competition. For example, in Los Angeles, these demographic changes have created enormous dislocation for African-Americans. All the black neighborhoods in Los Angeles -- Watts, South Central -- these are all suddenly becoming Spanish-speaking and Hispanic. You saw in the recent election in Los Angeles a very reputable Mexican-American candidate who was just narrowly defeated, largely because the African-American population voted against him. And they voted against him, in part, because there was all this drumbeat in Los Angeles about how Latinos are the sleeping giant, waking up and taking over the city. It was incumbent on African-Americans to say, you know, we are still here. We matter. We are not being replaced. There's a lot of tension of that sort in this country. Liberals don't like to talk about it because it doesn't fit into their notion of the happy rainbow.
Incidentally, there was a riot in Riverside County a few years ago between Hispanic students and black students at a high school. Hispanic students were protesting the fact that Latinos only get one week for history week, and African-Americans get a whole month. Obviously, Hispanics need more history lessons because not to realize that they are already part of African-Americans' history is to misunderstand the meaning of their own Hispanicism. These are not separate groups. We are African. It is part of what it means to be Hispanic.
What sort of books do you think young Hispanics will look to? Will they seek African-American authors for ideas about identity? Or only Hispanic authors?
Certainly anyone coming of age in later years tended to be compartmentalized, as I am indeed compartmentalized on bookstore shelves as a separate department altogether. And the very writers who created me are in their own little department. They're on another side of the bookstore. That's what I resent so deeply, the turning of literature into sociology.
