Brown: The Last Discovery of America

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

While advocates in the multiracial movement never explicitly indicate distaste for the minority that constitutes part of a mixed race individual, the insistence on the development of a new racial designation inadvertently associates this minority with inferiority. African-American studies professor Jared Sexton argues that the implicit rejection of the black race in multiracial discourse is due to the fact that the multiracial movement casts the black race as the reason for the woes of the multiracial ethnicity.¹⁷⁹ To compensate for these woes, the black race must be rejected and replaced with the multiracial ethnicity. Recognizing the negativity of the black race, and creating distance between black and multiracial alienates the marginalized minority.¹⁸⁰ As Sexton argues, the multiracial movement draws a line between black and multiracial, and allows privileges to one group over the other, similar to what occurred in Bacon’s Rebellion.¹⁸¹ By abandoning the black race rather than incorporating the struggle of blacks into the movement for respect for and recognition of mixed race individuals, self-identified multiracials position themselves parallel to the Irish who similarly excluded blacks from their struggle for labor rights.¹⁸²

Alynia Phillips, “The Multiracial Option: A Step in the White Direction,” California Law Review, Volume 105, Issue 6 (2018), 1875-1876. https://dx.doi.org/10.15779/Z38H98ZD1S.

Brown: The Last Discovery of America

Brown: The Last Discovery of America

Penguin Books
2012
256 Pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780142000793
eBook ISBN: 9781101161500

Richard Rodriguez

In his dazzling new memoir, Richard Rodriguez reflects on the color brown and the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America today. Rodriguez argues that America has been brown since its inception-since the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye. But more than simply a book about race, Brown is 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.

Table of Contents

Brown – Richard Rodriguez Preface
One: The Triad of Alexis de Tocqueville
Two: In the Brown Study
Three: The Prince and I
Four: Poor Richard
Five: Hispanic
Six: The Third Man
Seven: Dreams of a Temperate People
Eight: Gone West
Nine: Peter’s Avocado
Acknowledgments

Tags: Penguin Books, Richard Rodriguez

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2015 at 02:28Z and is filed under Autobiography, Books, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Monographs, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Brown: The Last Discovery of America

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