Brown: The Last Discovery of America

1
Brown The Last Discovery of America

• By Richard Rodriguez

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Thesis

• I write about race in America in hopes of
  undermining the notion of race in America (xi).
• The future is brown, is my thesis is as brown
  as the tarnished past (35).

3
Alexis de Tocqueville

• An aristocratic Frenchman who came to the U.S. in
  1831 -- when he was only 25 years old -- and
  later wrote Democracy in America, a two-volume
  study of the American people and their political
  institutions.
• For more information http//xroads.virginia.edu/
  HYPER/DETOC/

http//www.interet-general.info/article.php3?id_ar
ticle6126
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Americas Founding Palette

• Red American Indian
• Black African Slaves
• White Europeans

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Red American Indians

• A sort of barbarous luxury set off her
  costume
• rings of metal in ears and nose
• Hair adorned with glass beads, which fell on her
  shoulders
• condemned to a wandering life
• full of inexpressible sufferings because
  Europeans have disturbed the balance of nature
• Response to mistreatment is feline
• Refuses civilization

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Black African Slaves

• Negress
• wore squalid European garments (2)
• lost the memory of ancestors of custom and
  tongue
• Experienced degradation to his very soul
• has become a true slave
• finds his joy and his pride in the servile
  imitation of those who oppress him
• Response to mistreatment is canine
• Rendered unfit for civilization

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White Europeans

• The child is chalk, Europes daughter (1).
• displayed in her slightest gestures a
  consciousness of superiority that formed a
  strange contrast with her infantine weakness as
  if she received the attentions of her companions
  with a sort of condescension (2)

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Browns View of de Tocqueville

• Agent of history alters the relationship of the
  founding palette
• preoccupied alone with the meaning of his
  intrusion (3).

9
Buddy in the school yard

• If youre white, youre all right
• If youre brown, stick around
• If yours black, stand back.

10
Carl T. Rowan

• http//www.lib.utk.edu/refs/tnauthors/authors/rowa
  n-c.html
• I remember Carl T. Rowan, in other words, as
  myself, as I was. Perhaps that is what one
  mourns (10).

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The act of reading

• a kind of possession (10)
• How a society orders its bookshelves is as
  telling as the books a society writes and reads
  (11)

12
Books

• should confuse (12)
• there is only one subject What it feels like
  to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is
  typical (12).
• the universality of dissimilarity (12)
• it is the reader alone who decides a books
  universality (12)

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Books

• The nescience of a book can undermine its
  clarity, can spoil our pleasure in it (13).
• must be reimagined, misunderstood, read
• My reading was a thicket, from which I abserved
  (14).

14
Malcolm X

• Something in his manner, something I recognized,
  rhymed with the scholarship boy I was (15).
• there was something generous about this man,
  something of a Benjamin Franklin (16)

15
James Baldwin

• http//www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/b
  aldwin_j.html
• Active in civil rights movement
• His inclusion of gay themes resulted in a lot of
  savage criticism from the Black community.

16
The Name Game

• Dick Clarks American Bandstand
• Young Negroes renamed themselves black
• Black America led with America through the
  changes (17).

17
Dangerous romanticism

• Romanticism An artistic and intellectual
  movement originating in Europe in the late 18th
  century and characterized by a heightened
  interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's
  expression of emotion and imagination, departure
  from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and
  rebellion against established social rules and
  conventions.

18
Voices

• African Americans made English so cool, so jet,
  so festival, that children want it only that way
  (18).
• recognition of exclusion, expectation of
  exclusion (19)
• Jews always have to feel exactly what we are
  feeling, only more so (19)

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Brown Voices

• I have, throughout my writing life, wondered
  what a brown voice should sound like (20)
• I was never at war with the tongue (26)

20
Price of Equal Rights

• The price is segregation (26)

21
Literature

• the deathless impulse to explain and describe
  (27)

22
Black vs. White

• like listening to a bad marriage through a thin
  partition, a civil war replete with violence,
  recrimination, mimicry, slamming doors (29)