Brown
"I am a brown man in a black and white country. All of my life I have listened to the black and white conversation, like listening to a quarreling couple through a thin motel wall. In the 1950's and 60's I watched in awe as the Negro Civil Rights movement forced the end of segregation. There, on my family's black and white television, I saw President Johnson sign legislation marking an end of a black and white nation, and then the NBC peacock unfurled its wings, and America assumed color."
Richard Rodriguez
B r o w n Autumn
I really have a problem with people labeling me. I have always considered it a violation of my own right to define myself in my own terms. A few weeks ago, a professor trying to make a point, placed the argument “in my brownness.” I felt immediately singled out. I felt I had been classified without my consent. I felt I had been categorized by someone whose color represents the establishment. It was one more thing to add to my own sense of displacement and otherness. The hardest part was that, even though it bothered me, I did not say anything.
It is not about the color brown itself, which it is beautiful. It is about the arbitrary use of the color brown to describe not an animal or a thing, but a person. It is about the color brown not used in its literal meaning, but in its contextual meaning. It is about what the color brown signifies in North-America.
I wrote this poem about autumn and the color brown. It is my own way of letting go.
Brown, like autumn leaves,
I look at my self and see
Hues of light on my surface
All in tune,
Drumming!
My hair is dark brown,
My eyes are brown
My skin is light brown
Sephardic and Bantu
Brown soul.
Chino, Cubano, Taino or Gitano,
It does not matter to me,
I am all brown,
I can see on my skin
The ancestral prints
In my brownness,
I camouflage my being.
Autumn like. I see myself
In a rain of leaves.
I breathe earth
I am like them, brown
They are like me, brown
In our brownness
We find home
Browning autumn