GREGORY RODRIGUEZ – NOTES AND ESSAYS
A few months ago, my buddy Mike Madrid, whose new book publishes next week, interviewed me about some of the themes from my latest book, Whiteness: An American Tragedy and Other Essays. I always have a great time talking to Mike. This time was no different.
Istanbul
Last night, a group of very kind Bahraini women I met at a café here invited me to live in their wealthy little country in the Persian Gulf. My qualifications? I looked Arab. From which country? I asked. Kuwait, they all agreed.
When I first traveled to Europe as a 14-year-old kid, more than a few Spaniards I met insisted I was Chinese, which roughly translated to “really foreign” or “completely unlike us.” But more recently, my physiognomy has just as often given others reasons to include–rather than exclude–me.
Whether I’m in South Africa or Hawaii, locals are always projecting one or another ethnicity or racial category on me. In Johannesburg I’m “Coloured,” and in Honolulu I’ve often been mistaken for being a mix of Portuguese and Samoan. (Yes, that specific.)
But I shouldn’t say “mistaken,” because I don’t waste time correcting folks who are trying to welcome me into their group. You know what I mean, braddah? If people find common cause with me for my looks, it certainly beats the times those same looks aroused suspicion or plain old prejudice back in the continental US of A.
When the Bahrainis first asked me where I was from, I told them I was born in California. But my Americanness mattered little to them. They had already determined that I was one of them. The way I figured, they were vacationing in a non-Arab country, and they found an excuse to create connection with a chatty stranger.
By the end of our conversation, the youngest member of their group, a medical doctor, walked around the table to show me photos of Bahrain’s capital on her iPhone. Mostly they were nondescript images of marinas, restaurants, and walkways by the Gulf.
“We are an island country surrounded by water,” the doctor told me. And after a brutally hot summer in Madrid, the idea of island life genuinely appealed to me. And suddenly, so did the idea of leaning into my newly anointed Arab identity. I then turned to my new best friends and said, “As-salaam alaikum.”
April has been a busy month. I finished an 8,500-word essay I started researching way back in September, 2020. I took detours up to Paris and Frankfurt. Most importantly, I’ve been enjoying the beginnings of spring here in the Spanish capital. Sunday was a spectacularly beautiful day. The whole city seemed to be out and about. I felt like that was the first time I was able to exhale all month.
I’m particularly pleased that I’ve already begun to order books for my next essay. The optimistic part of me thinks I can write this in a year, but, heck, what’s the rush? That said, I’m finding that some of my most productive times intellectually are the lulls between my focused reading, those weeks and months that I’m able to veer off a particular project and just read whatever strikes my interest. My reading over the last six months has been particularly rich and varied. I started the year reading Malcolm Gaskill’s fascinating study of a 17th-century witch hunt in Springfield, Massachusetts, called The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World. Before that, I absolutely loved Zena Hitz’s wonderful Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. I’ve found a new hero in the late political theorist Judith Shklar. I particularly enjoyed her essays in Ordinary Vices and Redeeming American Political Thought. I very much look forwarding to tackling all her work in the next few years. Other favorites include Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, Robin Corey’s The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, Jamal Greene’s How Rights Went Wrong, and Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. I also read two popular books on the history and legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Todd Purdum’s An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.
I will publish the new essay after it’s edited and I process feedback from some folks who are giving it a pre-read. Meantime, blue skies are luring me out into the streets and it’s about time to find a café table where I can watch the rest of the afternoon go by.
Gregory Rodriguez has been a book author, newspaper columnist, television political pundit, independent scholar, think tank fellow, iconoclastic intellectual entrepreneur, publisher, and editor. He’s survived a grilling by Stephen Colbert and predicted the rise of the white grievance politics of Donald Trump in the pages of Time Magazine. His writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The (Singapore) Straits Times. His essay “Mongrel America,” which first appeared in The Atlantic, was included in The Best American Political Writing series. Contra Mundum is where he publishes essays and notes on the things that matter to him most—including American identity and history, the idea of home, the use of public space, the mechanics of white supremacy, encounters with total strangers, the tension between law and grace, the collisions and convergences born of migration, and the secrets to squeezing some joy out of what we may all agree is a pretty wretched world. Foreign Affairs called his book Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, “required reading for anyone interested in the future of the United States.” In 2023, he published a collection of essays entitled Whiteness: An American Tragedy and Other Essays. He is currently working on two new books. The first, “The Pope of Wilshire Boulevard,” is about minority strategies for maintaining dignity in U.S. society, and the second is on the coming collapse of the civil rights revolution.
