Brown: The Last Discovery of America

"A poetic, often contrarian meditation on race in modern America.

Borrowing from writer/philosopher William Gass, who deconstructed the meanings of a less socially charged color in On Being Blue, PBS commentator and essayist Rodriguez (Days of Obligation, 1992, etc.) ponders the meaning of Mexicanness, Hispanitude, mestizaje, and all the other forms of being brown in the US. “I write about race in America,” he begins, “in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.” With many asides on the origins of the notion that Hispanics are an ethnic minority—a recent idea, he suggests, adopted from the African-American struggle for civil rights—Rodriguez offers a few balloon-bursting observations on the tensions that have show more marked recent politics; the black-white argument, he writes, “is like listening to a bad marriage through a thin partition, a civil war replete with violence, recrimination, mimicry, slamming doors.” That’s not to say that those tensions are not real, and Rodriguez allows that plenty of doors have been slammed in his face as a brown, gay person. Plenty of others have been thrown open, though, affording him a privileged (and deserved) position as cultural commentator that he gratefully acknowledges. Without descending into sloganeering or us-versus-them rhetoric, Rodriguez argues for an inclusive “white freedom” accorded to all citizens; his democratic spirit and the absence of special pleading are both refreshing. In their erudition and irony, these writings recall the essays of the late Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who could easily have written the closing lines: “Truly, one way to appreciate the beauty of the world is to choose one color and to notice its recurrence in rooms, within landscapes. And upon bookshelves.”

Elegant, controversial, and altogether memorable." www.kirkusreviews.com, A Kirkus Starred Review show less

Oy, one I've wanted to read for such a long time, but not one that deserves to be read in the subway. These essays are beautifully written and masterfully structured, but they are not straight-forward. They require time, thought, and close reading--and, if only, discussion. It's probably a bit telling that it took me about twice as long to finish this slim, large-printed volume than it did for me to read my next two books, each of which was half again as long and with smaller type.

Gave me quite a bit of food for thought. One morsel that stuck out, professionally, was Rodriguez's dislike of being called a "Hispanic" writer--not only because of the odd origins and apparently exceptional unreality of "Hispanic" as a group, but because it show more then segregates books written by Latinx writers from other writers. As someone on the BISAC subject codes committee, I found this interesting. I wonder if the "Hispanic & Latino" subject heading has been applied to books not because they are about Hispanic/Latino/Latina/Latinx people but because they are by authors who others say fit those categories. (It is notoriously hard to get people to remember that subject categories are for what the book is about, not what the author is or what you want it to be. Sigh.) As Rodriguez points out, India's most famous author (Salman Rushdie) is a British citizen who has lived in the US and Canada for much of his life.

Anyway, just about every third page of my book is dog eared, so no quote roundup this time--there's no way I could narrow that down.

[Not sure of exact read dates. I'm too far behind...] show less