Essayist Richard Rodriguez of the Pacific News Service considers the changing face of America.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, Pacific News Service: Everywhere America is browning. Los Angeles is our largest brown city, California the largest brown state.
More than black and white.
Brown is moving West to East, South to North. Brown terrifies the skinhead in Colorado, bewilders the African-American historian. When President Clinton named John Hope Franklin to direct a national conversation on race relations, Professor Franklin was quick to insist the unfinished business of America, he said, is black and white. It is, at least, an irony of history that an African-American historian would end up arguing for the centrality of the black and white dialectic. For generations, white racists denied African-Americans the possibility of brown. The Ku Klux Klan was infuriated by the idea of brown: Brown, the color of family secrets, illicit passion; brown, the shade of love, and of drawn shades.
To deny the possibility of Brown, white racists concocted the one-drop theory, as it was called. Its aim was to keep the African slave a slave. Regardless of how light-skinned, how brown you may be, regardless of how racially mixed, you remained African if you carried a single drop of African blood. In fact, America was never just white and black. From the first day that African slaves were brought to these shores against their will there was a complicating third race: The Indian.
The Indian who fought against the European also married the European. The Indian married, too, the African. Every African-American I've ever known has told me somewhere in the course of our friendship, by the way, did you know that my grandmother was Cherokee, my great-grandfather was Sioux? The African-Indian marriage is the great unwritten chapter in American history. Lyndon Johnson seems to me the last black and white President of the United States. It was LBJ who oversaw the final years of the Negro Civil Rights movement, the collapse of our system of segregation: separate water fountains, separate schools, separate seats in the movie theater, designed to keep the races apart.
It is a mark of true emancipation that two of this nation's most prominent African-Americans, Colin Powell and Tiger Woods, are now able to speak so easily about their racial complexity. The Clinton administration has announced that in future we Americans will be able to describe ourselves on census forms as belonging to more than one race. But 25 years ago Richard Nixon, a Californian, moved us well beyond the black and white chessboard by providing five choices: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American.
In November, USA Today published a survey showing that 57 percent of American teenagers date inter-racially. The largest number--90 percent--are Hispanics. And why not? Most Hispanics are already mixed, either Mulatto Puerto Ricans or Mestizo Mexicans. Brown is pushing up from South of the border. Zebras--Robert Mapplethorp photographs--tuxedos--piano keys--the world of black and white is a world of sharp, cool, sometimes elegant contrasts about ideas or judgments we say are black and white we mean that they are simplistic, admitting no complexity or shadings.
And though increasingly America grows messy, brown, no one wants to speak about it, or how it may affect our national conversation on race. This season's most talked about books on race relations are black and white. There's an optimistic black and white written by Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom. And there's a pessimistic black and white from David Shipler. Take your pick.
I am a brown man in a black and white country. All of my life I have listened to the black and white conversation, like listening to a quarreling couple through a thin motel wall. In the 1950's and 60's I watched in awe as the Negro Civil Rights movement forced the end of segregation. There, on my family's black and white television, I saw President Johnson sign legislation marking an end of a black and white nation, and then the NBC peacock unfurled its wings, and America assumed color.
I'm Richard Rodriguez.