Brown

Reposted from two years ago today:

NewMexiKen attended a talk Saturday evening by Richard Rodriguez. His presentation was sponsored by The Chicano, Hispano, Latino Program (CHIPOTLE) of the University Libraries at the University of New Mexico. He was excellent.

Rodriguez is an author and journalist, his most recent book being Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002). He appears on The NewsHour on PBS.

Rodriguez’s 75-minute talk was on the browning of the world. It was an anecdotal, amusing, entertaining and provocative presentation. My notes are fleeting but include:

• The Senate voted to designate English the only language. Won’t they have to stop selling burritos in the Senate cafeteria? How could you even describe a burrito — tortilla, no, guacamole, no, chile, no.
• We don’t speak English, we speak American. (German words, Spanish words, French words, American Indian words.)
• Outside the U.S. there is no such thing as Hispanics. It’s a number of cultures not a race.
• HBO did a documentary on white culture. It was 15 minutes.
• The Census suggests there will be no racial distinctions by the 2020 census. The races are becoming too intermingled.
• One of his aunts, like Rodriguez part Spanish and part Indian, married an East Indian. Their daughter, his cousin, is an Indian Indian. (And she married an American Indian so their child is Indian Indian Indian.)
• Why is Barack Obama considered an African-American (i.e., black)? His mother was white.
• He’d gotten a letter from a woman who’s father was Muslim and mother was Jewish. She didn’t know what she was but Americans think of her as the frugal terrorist.

These one-liners, of course, do not do the talk justice. Underlying it all was the theme that individuals everywhere are crossing racial lines — as they have for centuries in some cultures. It’s the browning of the world. And now people are crossing religious lines, too. Reacting to it all are the extremists, doing all that they can to stop the mingling.