one-drop theory, the

LBJ The Indian who fought against the European also married the European. The Indian married, too, the African. Every African-American
I've ever known has told me somewhere in the course of our friendship, by the way, did you know that my grandmother was Cherokee,
my great-grandfather was Sioux? The African-Indian marriage is the great unwritten chapter in American history. Lyndon Johnson seems to me
the last black and white President of the United States. It was LBJ who oversaw the final years of the Negro Civil Rights movement, the
collapse of our system of segregation: separate water fountains, separate schools, separate seats in the movie theater, designed to keep
the races apart. . . .

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.

I'm Richard Rodriguez.