The Forum
Richard Rodriguez: Brown
Streaming Live:
Sunday, Jan. 4, 2009, 9:30 am PST
G U E S T
Richard Rodriguez,
Peabody award-winning journalist and author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Moderated by
The Very Rev. Alan Jones
Dean of Grace Cathedral
About the Program
When Senator Obama was just one candidate for President, Richard Rodriguez wrote “Barack Obama is brown. Mixed. There are millions of us in America who similarly belong to more than one race…Brown is not a new color to America. Our past is as brown as our future…In this world, the political necessity is for someone who might help us imagine lives larger than racial designations. A politician might win the day, if he or she were able to speak of the ways our lives are mixed.” (Newsweek, June 2, 2008). Now that Mr. Obama has become President-Elect Obama, Mr. Rodriguez will give us his unique perspective both on the first African-American president and what this coming year holds for the nation.
Born in San Francisco in 1944, award-winning journalist and author Richard Rodriguez’s latest book, Brown: The Last Discovery of America continues his memoirs that began with the award-winning Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father. In his latest book, he explores issues of race, arguing that America has been brown since its inception, as he himself is. Brown, in his view, is not a color, but a mixture, evidence of the blending of cultures which began the moment the African and European met within the Indian eye. The son of Mexican immigrants, he reflects on what it means to be Hispanic in America and how Latino immigrants have impacted American culture, changing it from a society that has traditionally seen itself as simply black and white.
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