Richard Rodriguez - Browning of America

Browning of America

Rodriguez's original ideas are further explored in his 2002 collection of essays entitled Brown: The Last Discovery of America, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award.

The "browning of America", a phrase that Rodriguez uses in Brown, may seem like a new coinage, but the term predated his book and has been used regularly to describe an increase in the mixing of cultural, racial, and ethnic identities in the United States in the past century. For Rodriguez the phrase has to do more with the color brown as a symbol of mélange in the United States or specifically an increase in its "bi- or even tri-racial" subgroups. The phrase is commonly applied to the current demographic shift towards a higher proportion of minorities in the total population in the United States. It can be used neutrally as a name for the current demographic shift in the United States, but has also been appropriated by organized groups on both the left and the right. The far right evokes the phrase generally as a minority-based usurping of customary or assumed White privilege, while the far left hails it as a welcomed rethinking and/or accountability of deep-seated notions of White "normativity."