Brown: The Last Discovery of America (review)

Abstract

It had been almost thirty years since I'd been in Los Angeles when I flew out to California from the Midwest to attend the 1987 convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, and from the time I landed to the moment my committee meeting began the next morning, I felt as if I were visiting a foreign country. I lived and worked in the rural center of Michigan's Lower Peninsula; in my community I knew of only one black family and at my university, in a dozen years of teaching, I'd had no more than a dozen "minority" students in the thousands I'd taught. In L.A., among baggage handlers, cashiers, taxi drivers, hotel clerks, waitresses, and salespersons, everyone who spoke to me used English with Meso-American, Caribbean, African, and Asian inflection; I met no one who spoke unaccented American English until I entered the room with my fellow English teachers. I was the Midwest representative on the NCTE Committee on Affiliates and the topic for our annual meeting this year was "diversity." It was a theme our committee embodied—I was one of two or three white men and among the other nine or ten members were several "women of color." When I told them of my monocultural hometown and my unbroken string of multicultural encounters in L.A., the Hispanic woman opposite me nodded sagely and the black woman next to me put her hand on my shoulder, leaned forward with a grin, and said, "Welcome to America, honey."