Golden Brown
I grew up in the 1970s, which was the Decade of Brown.
The general brownness of those years expressed itself in a myriad of ways. Pretty much everything “designed” was some shade of tan, mahogany, or chocolate. Cars, the interiors of homes, clothing, electronics, all of it. Fake wood, for example, was everywhere, and brown plaids and corduroys dominated the back-to-school wardrobe of my childhood. There are still parts of my house that have left over brown plywood veneer on them.
It wasn’t just a matter of designers’ taste, though. Brown was a general cultural preference. In food, for example, white was out and brown was in. Rice, sugar, bread, pasta, eggs: everything was to be a dusky color now. Brownness was goodness: it meant whole grains with more nutrition, less refinement and processing, and the idea of “natural”. Brown things that no one had eaten before, like carob, were suddenly everywhere. The Diet for a Small Planet was in, and so was macrobiotic cooking.
A lot of this was based in good science. Whole grains, for example, are a great idea nutritionally. Brown rice and whole wheat bread are, in fact, better for you without a doubt. But brown sugar? It’s just sugar. Unrefined honey? It’s just a different color. Brown eggs? Come on!
And none of this explains the deep dark wooden tones of damn near everything around us in those years.
The reason for it all was race. After the explosions of the 1960s, everyone realized that White Only wasn’t working, not for anyone. The left and the Civil Rights movement had won, and starting with the universities we all got a good PC reeducation. Brown people, we were told, were at least equal and probably superior to white people. As children we were marinated in “positive images” of brown-ness, at least in my Southern California primary schools. Most of this was for the best. After hundreds of years of racial insanity in my country, a bit of pendulum swing isn’t anything to complain of!
As the négritude of those times finally passed, we got back to disliking each others’ skin color like the dumb humans we are, writing Bell Curves and listening to Farrakhans and generally backsliding like drunks into our racial stupidity. But brown stayed in some places. Visit your local health food store and look around. Brown eggs? Check. Brown grains? Check. Dark, dark unrefined molasses and honey? Yup.
Our souls have been sold back to the devil. Brown people still make less money doing less pleasant jobs. Countries full of them we bomb or ignore. People still say “American” when they mean “white”. But our bellies? We fill them with the comforting mulatto foods of my childhood, because brown is the color of the noble savage, the unrefined “natural goodness” we all need to live.
I hear corduroy is making a comeback.
August 23rd, 2003 at 11:27 am
Interesting but are you really serious that affirmative action led to a mania for brown rice? Perhaps I have to have lived in SoCal in the 70s to understand that.
I admit there is an unfortunate analogy in our culture between clean/earthy and Caucasian/African. Both groups have alternately struggled against that symbolism or exploited it.
I tend to think it went the other way; “earthy” became good for a generation of Americans, possibly because their parents served them Jello salads as cuisine. The vague association with racial equality may have come along for the ride, but from where I sit, it looks mostly like an aesthetic revolt.
August 27th, 2003 at 4:17 pm
Perhaps this explains the govenor of California from 75-83?
Jerry Brown..
November 29th, 2003 at 10:15 pm
Help – who wrote that song?
December 1st, 2003 at 4:09 pm
Golden Brown was sung by The Stranglers and it was on the album “Hits and Heroes” 1981