Rodriguez talks about America, the color brown

Brazilian Portuguese has 300 words for the color brown.

English has only one.

Richard… Brazilian Portuguese has 300 words for the color brown.

English has only one.

Richard Rodriguez spoke about this and a multitude of other implications of the color brown to a crowded auditorium in David Lawrence Hall on Monday night, as part of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers series.

Drawing from his experiences as a child in Sacramento, up to his current interactions with people of various cultures, Rodriguez slowly filled in the lines of what became, by the end of the night, a vivid portrayal of modern, integrated America.

America, Rodriguez said, “is not a country that likes to talk about brown.”

Though not a country that likes to talk about brown, America is, he said, a country in which things have been “browning” for a long time. The United States presents its multi-racial citizens with quite a predicament, he added.

“When I tell you that Pittsburgh is browning, that the world is browning, I am not talking about Richard Rodriguez. I am talking about you, and you, and you,” he said, pointing to people in the audience.

Dwelling on the topic of the individual rather than discussing an idealized picture of what it means to be a certain race, Rodriguez minimized the individual only to make a point, with a dry sense of humor, about the subtlety of stereotypes.

The browning of America has been a subject about which Rodriguez has written, though sometimes indirectly, since his first book, “Hunger of Memory,” was published in 1982

“Brown means that we engage all the issues of our lives, the issues of contradiction, the sense of irony that we have about our lives, the sense of inconsistency in our lives,” he said in April of 2002, speaking on the Public Broadcasting Service’s “NewsHour” about his then-new book, “Brown.”

On Monday night, Rodriguez used a somewhat more subtle approach to explain his message, but he achieved the same effect.

“If I am here tonight to speak positively of brown, then I must also speak negatively,” Rodriguez said, going on to speak about the “grandson of an observing Jew who chose Hitler’s birthday” to go on a shooting spree at Columbine High School, and the heavy weight that children with parents of both Muslim and Jewish faith have to carry in a post-Sept. 11, 2001 world.

Rodriguez ended the night with a story that displayed an outward sense of humor, but summed up the deeper message of his talk. He described his nephew, who is of Indian, American Indian, and South American Indian descent.

“So the Indian Indian Indian is a waiter in San Francisco, and everyone tells him he looks Italian,” Rodriguez said.