From John Hope Franklin to the authors of the newest books on race relations, America thinks in terms of black and white. Yet brown is pushing relentless up from South of the border. Brown -- the color of family secrets, the shade of love -- has always terrified white racists because they allow no complexity or shadings. But increasingly, America grows messy, brown. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, an author and essayist for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, is completing a book on The Color Brown.

Everywhere America is browning. Los Angeles is our largest brown city, California our largest brown state. Brown is moving West to East, South to North. Brown terrifies the skinhead in Colorado; bewilders the African-American historian.

When President Clinton named John Hope Franklin to direct a national conversation on race relations, Professor Franklin was quick to insist that "the unfinished business of America" is black and white. It was, at least, an irony of history that an African-American historian would end up arguing for the centrality of the black and white dialectic.

For generations, white racists denied African Americans the possibility of brown. The Ku Klux Klan was infuriated by the very idea of brown -- brown, the color of family secrets, illicit passion; brown, the shade of love and of drawn shades.

To deny the biologic possibility of brown, white racists concocted the "one-drop theory." Its aim was to keep the African slave a slave. Regardless of how light-skinned, how brown you might be, regardless of how racially mixed, you remained African if you carried a single drop of African blood.

In fact, America was never just white and black. From the first day that African slaves were brought to these shores against their will there was a complicating third race: The Indian. The Indian fought against the European and 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 books.

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 and the collapse of segregation: separate water fountains, separate schools, separate seats in the movie theater, designed to keep black and white apart. It was Richard Nixon, a Californian, who 25 years ago moved us well beyond the black and white chessboard by providing five choices: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American.

It is a mark of true emancipation that two of this nation's most prominent African Americans, Colin Powell and Tiger Woods, are now able to speak so candidly about their racial complexity. And the Clinton administration has announced that in future we Americans will be able to describe ourselves on census forms as belonging to more than one race.

Last November USA Today published a survey showing that 57 percent of American teenagers date inter-racially. The largest number -- 90 percent -- are Hispanics. And why not? Most Hispanics are already mixed, either Mulatto Puerto Ricans or Mestizo Mexicans. Brown is pushing up from South of the border.

Zebras, Robert Mapplethorp photographs, tuxedos, piano keys --the world of black and white is a world of sharp, cool, sometimes elegant contrast. But about ideas or judgments we say are black and white, we mean that they are simplistic, admitting no complexity or shadings.

Despite the fact that America is browning, few public voices acknowledge brown or how it may affect our national conversation on race. This season's most talked about books on race relations are black and whites. There's an optimistic black and white written by Stephen and Abigail Thornstrom. And there's a pessimistic black and white from David Shipler. Take your pick.

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 to a black and white nation.

And then the NBC peacock unfurled its wings, and America assumed color.