Brown : the last discovery of America / Richard Rodriguez

"America is browning. As journalists, politicians, demographers, schoolteachers, and grandparents attempt to decipher what that might mean, Richard Rodriguez argues that America has been brown from its inception. Brown is not a singular color. It is a combination of several different ones, a shade created by desire - evidence of the erotic history of America, which began the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye." "Rodriguez reflects on various cultural associations of the color brown - toil, decay, impurity, time - arranging dazzling juxtapositions for which he is justly famous: Alexis de Tocqueville, Malcolm X, minstrel shows, Broadway musicals, Puritanism, the Sistine Chapel, Cubism, homosexuality, and the influence on his own life of two others who share his name - Ben Franklin's Poor Richard and Richard Nixon, whom Rodriguez calls "the dark father of hispanicity."" "At the core of the book is an assessment of the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America. Reflecting upon the new demographic profile of our country, Rodriguez observes that Hispanics are becoming Americanized at the same rate that the United States is becoming Latinized. Hispanics are coloring an American identity that traditionally has chosen to describe itself as black and white." "But to describe Brown as a book about race is misleading: It is really a book about America in the broadest sense, a look at what our country is, full of surprising observations by a writer who is a marvelous stylist as well as a trenchant observer and thinker."--BOOK JACKET.