We’re in love with colors

WASHINGTON — On a recent Friday, without realizing it, I planned an exceedingly brown evening.

It started with an after-work rendezvous at a bookstore with an African American friend for a reading by Latino author Richard Rodriguez. Next up: fish cakes and pad see eaw at a nearby Thai restaurant before joining white Mennonite friends to see the acclaimed Indian film "Monsoon Wedding."

We’re talking five cultures in four hours. No wonder I was too exhausted to make the movie.

Still, the night’s overwhelming brown-ness didn’t occur to me until the San Francisco-based Rodriguez described his fascinating new book, "Brown: The Last Discovery of America" (Viking).

Americans’ current "meltdown culture" is reflected in our heroes, fashion, language — in every cultural vestige, Rodriguez told 50 listeners.

"The fact that we are diverse is the most important thing we are."

To Rodriguez, 57, "brown" isn’t merely a popular designation for Hispanics, who, he writes, "brown an America that traditionally sees itself as black and white." It’s the color, the attitude, the culture you get when a planet’s music, cuisines, hairstyles, skin shades and religions melt into each other, liquefied by love’s unquenchable flame.

Though our nation’s history is "a recitation of conflicts," Rodriguez said, the wars and violence that separated us ultimately resulted in people coming together. The mountain man went off with the Indian woman; the black man — and increasingly, woman — with the descendant of an ancestor’s owner.

So Rodriguez meets people who call themselves "Blaxicans" (black Mexican), Hinjews (Hindu-Jewish) and "Negropinos" (black Filipino). One introduced herself as a "Korean-African-Baptist-Buddhist." Another, the product of a Jewish-Muslim marriage, joked that some might regard her as "a very frugal terrorist."

"Love is a dangerous thing," said Rodriguez. "We’re in the midst of a revolution in our bedrooms and on our plates."

Brown is both irritating and inspiring. It encouraged Madonna — Rodriguez’s "queen of brown" — to morph from Marilyn Monroe to geisha to Hindu priestess. It fooled J.Lo into believing she could safely sing about "my niggaz." It results in blond, dreadlocked Asian salesclerks, baggy-clothed white hip-hoppers, and preppy blacks on high school crew teams.

I once watched a cocoa-colored talk show guest — whom most people would have described as African American — explain that she rejected racial labels because the only true race "is the human one."

You’d think she had donned a white hood and whistled "Dixie." Black audience members attacked her as a self-hating fool. But Rodriguez hears from many people who refuse or defy racial categorization.

"When Tiger Woods won’t call himself black because he’s too many things, he’s challenging the racial universe," said Rodriguez, who’s equally sympathetic to Michael Jackson. "Whatever he’s doing to his face, the experiment engages me no less than Joan Rivers deciding to (look) 24."

Listening to Rodriguez, you wonder: Who aren’t we connected to? He described his outrage at hearing a news report that Latinos will soon "replace" African Americans as the nation’s largest minority group.

"How can I replace (blacks) when I owe my being to them?" he asked. "I cannot imagine myself having written this book without the civil rights movement, without James Baldwin. … The notion of one group ‘replacing’ another is offensive — and anti-historical."

More disturbing is that "there are brown children at war with their brown-ness who say, ‘I want one color.’ " They include Osama bin Laden, some of whose followers have found common, anti-Semitic ground with neo-Nazis.

Rodriguez would disagree with anyone who suggests that all of this blending means everyone is equally accepted. "It doesn’t mean racism disappears tomorrow."

It just makes its discussion more complex.

"Latin Americans were always candid about intermarriage — we have more than 300 nouns describing racial combinations," he said. At the same time, certain Latino families "still describe the fair-skinned child as being ‘la bonita’ (the pretty one) and the dark child being ‘la fea’ (the ugly one)."

That’s why "watching Telemundo is like watching Swedish TV."

What will we lose in a brown world? Brown-ness surely threatens whites who cringe at the encroaching dark hordes and blacks who see every white person as "naturally" oppressive.

But what does it mean to loving people of every shade who fear seeing their ancestral cultures disappear? Can you embrace brown and be proud of your Irish or Chinese roots? What of African Americans who overcame such self-defeating falsehoods as ‘black is ugly’ and ‘kinky hair is bad’ to achieve self-love?

Now we’re supposed to embrace green contact lenses and platinum perms?

We already have. Some of us out of self-rejection, but many out of curiosity and because — as any toddler will tell you — it’s fun playing with colors.

Rodriguez enjoys nothing more. He loves "the way that we have absorbed each other." His bottom line:

"It’s time we admitted we’ve been in love with each other for a long time."

Donna Britt can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.