The sidewalks and patios of downtown Bangkok are bursting with shoppers and traffic-stopping selfie-takers on a hot mid-December evening. Terminal 21, a travel-themed mid-level mall, offers an air-conditioned respite from the outdoor hustle. On this particular night, I’m looking for a getaway as I avoid an outdoor Christmas party hosted by the students at the Wattana Wittaya Academy, an elite boarding school for girls. The academy and I have had our differences, but by and large we’ve learned to get along. My temporary base in Bangkok overlooks the school’s yard, and I’ve already got accustomed to—or decided to find charming—the wafting sounds of Christmas carols as early as 6:30 a.m. in the lead-up to the holidays. The morning assembly’s motivational speeches became white noise after a few days. But I draw the line at a whole evening of “White Christmas,” even in Bing Crosby’s supple voice.
I stop at a local T-shirt stand called Over the Sky for some basics to get me through a few weeks of winter heat. Although the tiny kiosk miraculously holds a stock of over forty or fifty designs in all sizes, items come in a limited number of colours: white, green, blue, black and brown. I opt for a series of T-shirts with geometric patterns, trying on a handful in different colours. The sales assistant’s English is limited, but he can still be quite vocal when my pick doesn’t match what he has in mind for me. He also offers his honest opinion on which colours look better on me: black, blue and (in the right shade) green. He just doesn’t see me in white or brown. White highlights my grey hair, while brown washes me out. He dramatizes the latter observation by putting a brown shirt on his own brown skin and uttering, “Same, same,” a phrase so popular in Thailand that a nearby store sells T-shirts with these very words printed on them.
He has a point, though, and it’s one that I’ve known on an instinctive level for some time. Brown is just not my colour—when it comes to clothes. I like it on floors, credenzas and window blinds, but I can count on one hand the number of brown clothing items I’ve bought in the last, say, ten or fifteen years. As a child, I hated the colour red. But as a middle-aged man living in the West, I felt that brown clothes on brown skin would make me look more “ethnic” when all I craved was to blend in, to be less visible. My mind associates the colour with feces. Why would I want to wear the colour of shit? Am I being too unreasonable, too self-loathing? I know that many other brown people tend to avoid wearing the colour too close to their faces for similar reasons. (Brown pants and skirts are acceptable for some, but they must be paired with another colour on top.) What’s in the colour brown, and how does it affect us, all of us, psychologically?
IN THE WORLD OF colour psychology—a field that veers between catering to the academically arcane and serving the market needs of corporate branding and home decor, with a stopover in New Age wonderland—brown is always the bridesmaid and never the bride.
It’s not the main attraction or a standout in an artist’s palette, but it is a solid background colour that, according to the website Empower Yourself with Color Psychology, suggests hard work, industriousness and reliability. It’s a colour you can count on to get the job done. Little wonder, then, that UPS chose brown (Pullman Brown, to be exact) for its courier business. If you’re sending something across international or state borders, the thinking goes, you want to go with a company whose corporate colour suggests reliability and efficiency. The founder of UPS, James Casey, initially fancied delivery trucks in yellow, but according to company lore, Charlie Soderstrom brought brown with him when he became a partner in 1916. It would be impossible to keep yellow trucks clean on the dirt roads of early twentieth-century America, Soderstrom reasoned, while brown hid dust and grime nicely. Brown, now the company’s nickname, will always deliver.
On the other extreme end of that efficiency scale are the Storm Troopers, the paramilitaries who facilitated the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. They became known as Brownshirts after the colour of their uniforms. The headquarters for the Nazi Party in Munich was called the Brown House. Electoral maps of Germany in the 1930s used the colour brown to mark districts won by the Nazi Party. Proving the main tenet of colour psychology—that colour goes beyond aesthetics and into meaning—brown subliminally established a relationship between the working class and military might on one side and the Nazi Party on the other. And yet the party may have chosen its official colour not by design but by accident—surplus brown army uniforms from Germany’s colonial forces in Africa were available at bargain prices in the 1920s.
Designers generally use brown as a background colour. They consider it ideal for floors, especially in darker hues, because it hides dirt (just as it does on parcel delivery vans). Although it suggests warmth to many, brown is one of the least preferred colours in the Western world, asserts Empower Yourself with Color Psychology. (Bizarrely, it shares this sad category with colours that designers normally describe as “brilliant” or eye-catching: yellow and orange.) It’s difficult to understand why brown remains the runt of the colour litter, particularly when you think of its association with nature. Like green, it sends a strong environmental message: the colour of earth, of trees. Think of logs about to go into the fire, a walk in the woods or, depending on the shade of brown, a sandy beach.
In the Western world, decades of environmental consciousness and activism have done little to promote brown as a colour that’s at one with the natural world. A probable exception is the brown paper bag as an alternative to plastic. The colour green, by contrast, has come to define the ecology movement, with political parties across the Western Hemisphere taking their name from it. I suspect that a left-leaning, environmentally conscious party known as the Browns would not have the same political resonance. I also wonder if the colour’s association with ethnic and migrant groups that multiply ferociously and—as they move to a middle-class, consumer society—leave a bigger environmental footprint puts it at odds with an ecology movement that’s largely represented by white activists and scientists. Unless you live in the Land of Oz, green carries none of the associations with skin colour or racial groupings that brown does.
Perhaps too much brown undermines the message. As colour psychologist Karen Haller notes, despite its ruggedness, brown can elicit feelings of “heaviness” and “lack of sophistication.” And yet in fashion, brown often symbolizes luxury, excess, desire—especially in silk and satin fabrics. In women’s clothes, brown business suits suggest strength but with a hint of earth mother to soften any “ball-buster” connotations. Still, fashion editors advise women to break up the brown by wearing it in combination with another colour. Again, it’s not a colour that’s allowed to dominate. Men in brown suits run the risk of looking cheap if they don’t select the cut and the shade carefully. A brown suit in a light shade that’s one size too big telegraphs certain messages: borrowed, hand-me-down, struggling immigrant about to go to an interview for a telemarketing job. In Saturday Night Live sketches set in the world of 1960s game shows, male contestants are often dressed in brown suits to emphasize the “period” feel.
The tan suit that President Obama wore for a White House briefing in late August 2014 elicited many class-based responses (some hilarious and some racist) in both mainstream and social media. On the “anniversary” of the suit’s debut, Esquire ran a satirical follow-up on the “worst suit in presidential history.” Talk of a Sears suit and borrowing his father’s church suit served as code for the black president’s outsider status—the message was that he didn’t belong in Washington, even after six years on the job. The more serious commentators pointed out that the tan suit, even in the dog days of summer, didn’t strike a grave enough tone for a briefing on such issues as ISIS and Vladimir Putin.
Toronto-based Anna Romanovska teaches colour theory at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion and has worked as a theatre costume designer in her home country of Latvia. She believes brown has stodgy and drab connotations and has avoided it in her designs. “If you want someone to disappear on stage, dress them up in brown,” she tells me, pointing out that brown absorbs light, while bright colours reflect it. She has dressed many supporting characters in brown to deflect attention from them and direct it at the actors in the leading roles (and the light-coloured costumes).
For most people, however, brown elicits visceral reactions on very different ends of the pleasure/disgust meter. It’s associated with chocolate and cocoa beans, as well as fancy coffee drinks like lattes and macchiatos—little symbols of luxury or authenticity. Think a rustic free-trade coffee shop, an emblem of gentrification from Cairns to Cairo, with its wooden tables, bowls of brown sugar and selection of preservative-free, homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Dieticians recommend brown rice and other unbleached grains over white varieties for their nutritional and organic qualities.
But brown also invokes more repulsive images: it’s the colour of feces and sewage. It represents our discomfort with and social awkwardness around bodily functions. No wonder we call obsequious people brown-nosers. The phrase is a one-two punch, capturing social opprobrium while also revealing our unease with exposing or getting close to our own anatomy.
Brown’s association with certain smells has often tested my own racial biases and tendency to fall back on stereotypes. When I lived in England in the 1990s, the laziest (and by that I mean probably the least offensive) racial slur to toss at an Indian or Pakistani person was to say he smelled of curry. Something about a brown skin evoked the strong smell of a spicy dish. I fell for it. I noticed the scent of Indian food whenever I visited the family home of a Pakistani friend, and I came to associate his national identity with the smell of the food his family cooked. This link hit home when, in the early stages of our relationship, a German boyfriend told me that my sweat emitted a certain odour that probably came from eating lots of Indian and Arabic food. In fact, I ate little of both cuisines, since they required too much preparation and I was living in student housing with a communal kitchen at the time. Still, I felt so self-conscious that I made sure not to eat any remotely spicy food in the seventy-two hours immediately before seeing him.
I know I shouldn’t have taken a throwaway comment so seriously, and now I look back and laugh it off, but that exchange represents how the colour brown—on my skin, in my wardrobe, in the minds (and noses) of others—can elicit strong reactions. Despite its neutral role in home decor, it vaults from background to foreground in the social and political arenas. That history goes back to the early days of colonialism, when European men first came into contact with people whose skin colours and facial features, not to mention cultures and religions, differed from theirs. Colonialism may have been chiefly about acquiring land and resources, but among its lasting legacies is a still-thriving tradition of categorizing people according to their physical characteristics, with skin colour as the most salient feature. Sociologists and biologists refer to it as the science of human taxonomy, but it’s best understood in terms of power and dominance.
In the eighteenth century, when European sovereign nations ramped up their expansionist missions, brown people entered Western consciousness as a different and newly discovered race within a then-burgeoning field of race science. Much of that science has since been debunked as merely furnishing imperial powers with excuses to dominate “weaker” races, and most of the scientists and anthropologists associated with it are, deservedly, long forgotten. However, the creation (and subsequent dismantling) of the brown “race” offers some sobering lessons to our modern world. In the early eighteenth century, Europeans’ ability and willingness to emigrate was seen as evidence of their superior physical and mental powers, and of their rightful claim to the rest of the world. Today, when brown people dominate modern migration patterns, both the context of their movement and the very meaning of it have changed. Modern-day migration is a way not of mastering the world but of serving its economic needs—not to liberate and conquer but to be enslaved and submit—since the vast majority of brown people migrate out of desperation.
A look back at highlights from two centuries of debates on race and ethnicity in Western science and culture provides a certain historical context—and a vital link to where we stand today.
LOOKED AT IN TERMS of human evolution, using skin colour to categorize people into distinct racial groups is a relatively recent endeavour. Historians of race, and in particular of what’s now known as scientific racism, identify Carolus Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish zoologist and botanist, as the first to create a four-part racial scheme with a corresponding colour system: Europeans were white, Africans black, Asians yellow and Native Americans red. From the 1730s until his death in 1778, Linnaeus turned his attention to classification of animals, insects, plants—and humans.
Later in the eighteenth century, German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach added a fifth racial group to Linnaeus’s existing four: browns, or what he called the Malay race. (He called the four other groups Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian and American.) The Malay race covered a large swath of what we would now call South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, stretching from Thailand and Malaysia to the Pacific Islands and Australia.
As Nell Irvin Painter explains in her thoroughgoing History of White People, Blumenbach was both ahead of and representative of the racialist thinking of his time. He asserted the superiority of the white, European race not just in physical strength and standards of beauty but in moral character and temperament as well. In introducing the brown race in the revised edition of his influential On the Natural Variety of Mankind in 1781, Blumenbach (who, like many of his contemporaries, was a skull collector) filled the middle space between the “beautiful” whites and the “ugly” Mongolians. The idea of a brown group of people as a “buffer” race starts with him, and while much of his work is now discounted, this particular aspect shows remarkable resiliency, even if the specifics and contexts have changed. In a large number of societies, being brown still means occupying that middle space, on the cusp of whiteness and on the edge of blackness.
It was Blumenbach who first parsed the role of climate on skin colour, explaining how and why darker people lived in hot climates, while lighter ones prevailed in colder regions. He chided European women for risking the brilliant whiteness of their skins, earned after months of indoor winter life, by spending too much time in the summer sun and becoming “sensibly browner.” To be brown marked not just a change in skin colour but a deviation from the standard of beauty that absolute whiteness demanded. Blumenbach’s work employed scientific terms and theories to deliver aesthetic pronouncements. Beauty is whiteness, and whiteness is scientifically proven to be beautiful. As Painter puts it, “Race begat beauty, and even scientists succumbed to desire.” It wouldn’t be the last time in modern Western history that science was pressed into servicing the political and racial assumptions of the day.
Throughout the late eighteenth century and into the mid-twentieth, a host of European and American anthropologists, race scientists and natural historians followed in the imposing footsteps of Blumenbach, providing grist for the colonialist and segregationist mills. The organization of humans into colour-coded groups positioned along a sliding scale of physical and moral characteristics supplied a counter-revolutionary narrative—just what imperial nations wanted to hear to silence opposition to their missions.
Christoph Meiners, a friend and contemporary of Blumenbach’s, was far less rigorous in his methodology, according to Painter, but he advocated the enslavement of what he believed to be inferior races. After his death in 1810, Meiners’s name disappeared from history and science books until the 1920s. The Nazis revived his fortunes when they latched on to his “scientific” conclusion that Germans had the most delicate skin and the purest blood among the superior race of Europeans. Meiners’s wobbly research supplied the foundation for an ideology of racial genocide.
What’s remarkable in all this is how the parameters of being brown kept expanding and contracting, depending on changing ideological and political contexts. The brown race was a revolving door of nationalities and nomads. Egyptians, for example, came in and out of it. Ethiopians were black to Blumenbach but brown to some of his successors. In the early twentieth century, Scottish folklorist and historian Donald Alexander Mackenzie and Australian-British brain anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith championed the idea of a “Mediterranean” race from which all modern humans had descended—a theory that contested the established one about the African roots of Homo sapiens. They described this new group as a “swarthy” darker-skin race that stretched from the Middle East to Britain, with ancient Egypt at its nerve centre. British people with darker complexions than their peers, Smith suggested, could trace their origins to this expansive race. While popular, Mackenzie’s and Smith’s theories didn’t gain much traction with the scientific or military communities. A Britain that had declared itself the empire was hardly going to accept the suggestion that its people shared genetic roots with its colonial subjects, its inferiors.
Many historians consider American eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard’s work locating the brown race within specific parts of the world to be the most extensive exercise in racial mapping. However, Stoddard’s classifications come wrapped in an overtly racist and alarmist rhetoric, even when measured against the period’s inflammatory standards. In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), Stoddard defined the brown race as those who live in North Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and parts of the Pacific—calling them “nearly as numerous and much more wide-spread than the yellows,” or East Asians.
Stoddard’s work resonated because it came at a turning point in US race relations, when Americans were reacting to an influx of immigrants from Italy, Eastern Europe and Greece—people European in origin but considered inferior, in part because of their darker skin. The debate on race had moved on from the immorality of slavery in a free republic to how the country must remain the rightful property of a white, Nordic European race, despite successive waves of immigration from all over the globe. Stoddard championed the Immigration Act of 1924, a series of laws that limited the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans, and prohibited entirely the immigration of Arabs and Asians.
Another American, Charles Davenport, led a new eugenics movement that emerged as a reaction to the racially diverse wave of immigration to the United States between 1890 and 1920. He received funds from prominent philanthropists and foundations (including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution) to establish the Eugenics Record Office, which was tasked with “register[ing] the genetic backgrounds of the American population and distinguish[ing] between good and defective lineages.” And although he was speaking metaphorically when he talked about building walls to protect America, he conceived of his “science” as literally the country’s last defence against non-white newcomers. “Can we build a wall high enough around this country, so as to keep out these cheaper races,” he wrote, “or will it be a feeble dam . . . leaving it to our descendants to abandon the country to the blacks, browns and yellows and seek an asylum in New Zealand?”
The rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe in the 1930s put critics of scientific racism into overdrive. A new narrative to debunk the racialists emerged in such books as We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems, published in 1935 by British biologist Julian Huxley and anthropologist A. C. Haddon, who argued that science offered only a “limited definition of race.” American anthropologists Gene Weltfish and Ruth Benedict contributed to the conversation three years later with The Races of Mankind, which posited that any scientifically based differences between racial groups were at best superficial and did not provide the physical or moral grounds for the superiority of one race over another. Benedict’s mentor at Columbia University’s storied anthropology department, Franz Boaz, had already dismissed as inaccurate any suggestion of differences in the brains of white and black people in his influential work The Mind of Primitive Man, first published in 1911. His studies, however, gained new momentum in the years before and after the Second World War.
By the end of the Second World War and into the early 1950s, the tide began to shift. As imperial powers loosened their grips on subjugated nations, it became clear that the colonialist assumptions of race- and colour-based human classification went against the liberationist ethos of the era (not to mention recent scientific advances in biology and genetics). The very notion of race—let alone one defined by skin colour—lost credibility. Ashley Montagu, who followed in the footsteps of Benedict and Boaz, argued that race is nothing but a social construct, a concept that endures among social scientists and anti-racism activists. Montagu helped draft the United Nations’ 1949 Statement on Race, as well as a similar document for UNESCO a year later.
IN THE PAST TWO decades, sociologists started to favour a more nuanced approach: to use “ethnicity” as a more politically neutral term than “race” for understanding who we all are. In their handy 2012 guide, Race and Ethnicity: The Basics, Peter Kivisto and Paul R. Croll offer a summary of three working hypotheses that negotiate the relationship between race and ethnicity.
The first of the three hypotheses, which they quickly dismiss, views race and ethnicity as two distinct groupings. In this way of thinking, “ethnicity” refers to those who left their homelands voluntarily (say, Italian or Irish Americans), while “race” refers to people whose migration or extermination (my word) has been traumatic (as it was for, respectively, Africans and Native Americans). This is a very American-centric view of the human experience that creates more problems than it solves. In this scheme, both Asians and Latinos are considered a race, even when their immigration history is closer to that of Italians than Africans.
A second hypothesis sees race and ethnicity as overlapping. Here, race is viewed as a natural and permanent category. A person is either black or white, Asian or Native American. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is more fluid and historically defined. It’s also claimed by the groups themselves, whereas race is normally forced upon them. While there are a lot of merits in this hypothesis—especially in recognizing the benefits of self-determination—Kivisto and Croll believe it falls short of capturing the complexity of human experience. Italian and Irish immigrants to the United States and Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were seen as undesirable by the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic majorities. And yet within about a century, they have claimed a space for themselves as part of the white majority, moving from the ethnic to the racial while also moving up the ethnic social ladder. Later ethnic groups from the Caribbean or South Asia occupied a place formerly held by immigrants from Southern Europe. The same process applied to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe at about the same time. Most of them will now be considered—and consider themselves to be—white. As historian David Roedigar illustrates in his book Working Toward Whiteness, this process hinged on a socio-economic movement from the working to the middle classes.
Skin colour, of course, was also a major factor. Many of these groups didn’t have to “pass” for white because they were by and large white (“invisible minority,” as a later term would have it). They simply restored ties to the dominant white racial group that had been severed by some eugenicists and advocates of a Nordic America.
Kivisto and Croll’s final hypothesis—the one that most current sociologists favour—is that race is a subset of ethnicity. In this model, “ethnicity” becomes an umbrella term that encompasses language, religion, geographic origin and race. It reduces the role of, but does not completely eradicate, race as an element in determining the parameters of any given ethnicity. Sociologist Steve Fenton argues that it frees our understanding of who we are from the centuries of “discredited science and malevolent practices” that are inherent in the term “race.” To me it’s a reasonable hypothesis, but by no means does it eliminate the violent aspect of racial encounters. Even recent history has shown that differences based on race can be supplanted by ethnic ruptures that range from skirmishes (Quebec) to cleansing (Serbia) to genocide (Rwanda).
Still, for brown people who formed the majority of the colonized, the shift away from racial to ethnic was welcomed and encouraged. We felt less like an inferior race and more like people with agency. Our inferiority was not a scientific fact but a political fiction written by representatives of the systems that oppressed us. But it would be the last time in history when brown people formed a social or anthropological bloc (as disadvantaged as that bloc might have been). The brown race was divided. It vanished from popular books, racist propaganda and “scientific” papers as each region charted its own course in the modern world. In theory at least, the globe was carved out not along racial lines but economic ones: the Industrial North and the Global South, the developed and developing worlds, and so on.
You may think that these economic divisions represent some progress in how groups of nations identify each other—that they offer a more neutral demarcation system than race. It hasn’t worked out that way. The labels may have changed, but people in brown nations continue to occupy a similar low place in the hierarchy of power and influence. You’ll find us in the developing, Global South and Third World aisles of the world’s supermarket. Whether they’re located in a racial or economic model, browns have a long way to go. Is there a case for what sociologists call “lumping”—identifying groups by a wider set of signifiers? Can we reunite the brown people without reviving the essentialist thinking that begat the brown race?
I believe so. And there has never been a better time to examine what it means to be brown in all its contradictions. The headlines of 2015—from Donald Trump’s race baiting to the Paris terrorist attacks to the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis—prove that brown bodies continue to endure, and inflict, serious suffering.
In the US and Canada, living while brown elicits a peculiar kind of racial animus that differs from the one that dogs the black community, especially its young men. Anti-brown racism is a brew of cultural incomprehension, religious fear and economic insecurity—with some good old-fashioned colour-based discrimination thrown in.
If anti-brown racism were to be analyzed in a lab, you’d find traces of suspicion based on more than two centuries of the kind of Orientalism that has cast people with swarthy skins as shifty, duplicitous and dangerous, whether they come from the jungles of India or the deserts of Arabia. We were cast as wily when we tried to free ourselves from colonialism and as devious when we collaborated with it.
Lab results will also reveal droplets of ambivalence, particularly in a Western context. Brown people seem close to the mainstream, so normal, and many of us are light enough to pass for a tanned white person. And yet we worship different gods (too many gods), wear strange face covers and write from right to left—all of which designates us as strangers still. We’re hired in different parts of the world for our skills and often recruited (or dragged) from our home countries as temporary or seasonal foreign workers, but the welcome mat is pulled from under us if we want to transition from guests into permanent residents, or if we wish to be united with our spouses, children or parents. Our labour is in demand, our families less so. This happens in Asia and Africa as it does in Europe and North America. The recruitment and then expulsion of Asians in East Africa and the collective slave-driving of Filipinos in Singapore and Hong Kong bear testimony to this.
Even when we don’t compete for low-paid jobs, ambivalence remains in the picture. Like the Chinese specifically and East Asians in general, brown people who do well in North America are held up as a model minority—the kind of citizens who (unlike African Americans, as the thinking goes) work hard, value education and don’t ask for handouts or play the victim. In other words, white populations have designated us as a buffer group between themselves and the black community—a process that has only gained momentum in the neo-liberal interpretation of race relations. In this model, the elevation of brown (and Chinese) people as full participants in the market economy is cited as evidence that the system is colour-blind, that racism no longer exists. In a market-driven model, writes Arlene Dávila in Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race, her analysis of the Hispanic community in the US, “citizens who are entrepreneurial can reign supreme, unencumbered by the pettiness of race, ethnicity and gender.”
And yet this very ideology, almost as a sleight of hand, turns around and singles out, for example, Arabs or Muslims as outsiders to a value system based on criteria that move with the political winds. Two works that nearly bookend the first decade of this century—Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk (2000) and Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (2008)—explore the dichotomous nature of white America’s response to its darker citizens. Both books draw on the work of black writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) what it was like to constantly be asked, in indirect ways, “How does it feel to be a problem?”
Prashad asks of South Asians, “How does it feel to be a solution?” A solution to America’s long and torturous history of race relations, to be exact. He explores the contradictions that led to the elevation of middle-class South Asians as a model minority—a role model to blacks and other groups lagging behind, including Mexicans and other Hispanics—while the working class among them (taxi drivers, fast food workers and clerks at convenience stores) continue to experience the worst in racial discrimination and violence. Toward the end of the decade, when America’s attention had focused almost entirely on the Arab population, there was very little of that “solution” magic left for Bayoumi to conjure. Brown people of Arab descent have been branded a problem for America’s security and a test to its faith in itself as a melting pot of possibilities and dreams.
Brown is also slippery and potentially indefinable. Who counts as brown and who doesn’t can sometimes be a matter of self-identification (or self-denial). Two black friends have suggested to me that the relatively light skin tones of Syrian refugees explain why Canadians have opened their wallets and homes so generously. Black refugees don’t fare as well because they’re not “almost white.” My father would have had a breakdown had anyone called him brown. In his mind, he was a light-skinned man who just happened to have been born south of the Saudi desert. “Your mother,” he’d tell me, “is brown.” Many light-skinned Mexicans, Egyptians, Iranians and others I know spend much of their time and money enhancing the physical and economic features that align them to whiteness: lighter hair colour, the right kind of makeup, non-ethnic clothing (at least in public), unaccented English. They try to wash the brown away by reversing the layers of the coconut. In the classic coconut model, a person acts white on the inside while remaining brown on the outside. The reverse model hides the inner brown under a layer of white accoutrements and signifiers.
Brown groups are often conflated with and mistaken for each other. A report from a South Asian–American group suggested that between 2010 and 2014, a rise in xenophobic and racist rhetoric in the country’s political discourse was echoed by an uptick in hate crimes and violence against a wide group of brown people. The report focused on South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Middle Eastern and other Arab communities. During the four years studied in the report, many Hindus and Sikhs (and Christian Arabs) were assaulted, both verbally and physically, and even killed for what the perpetrators assumed to be their Muslim identity. (Eighty percent of hate crimes described in the report were motivated by anti-Muslim feelings.)
The implied “all brown people look the same” mentality explains why, when it comes to casting supporting and minor characters with dark skin in films and on TV, authenticity takes a back seat to availability or versatility. What matters most is the right shade of brown. Indian actors get cast as Arabs and Arabs as Indians. The proliferation of terrorism-themed films and TV shows since 9/11 has been a boon for brown supporting actors of all ethnicities. And sometimes it goes beyond supporting parts and into lead roles. In Rosewater, comedian Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays an Iranian-Canadian.
We can be grateful for the fact that at least an actor from the brown continuum got the part. As another comedian, Aziz Ansari, reminded us, Hollywood was still indulging guilt-free in a bit of brownfacing (casting white actors in ethnic roles and simply darkening their skin with makeup) not that long ago—1988’s Short Circuit 2. And the practice of whitewashing historical figures from the Global South continues. The casting of Ben Affleck as CIA agent Tony Mendez in Argo or Gerard Butler and other white actors as ancient Egyptians in Gods of Egypt suggests that, to the film industry, our stories (or the Hollywood version of them) can be told only if we’re excluded from leading roles.
This is where writing about brownness gets tricky. My friends have been challenging me on my criteria, asking me to produce my guest list for the brown party.
No, I don’t go around carrying a colour swatch with all the shades of brown and measuring people’s skins against it to determine who qualifies and who doesn’t. To me, brown is not a literal definition but an experiential one, and context determines everything. It’s about falling outside the black-and-white binary in North America. In Europe, brownness follows the legacy of colonialism and the compatibility (or lack thereof) of different cultures with Western liberal values. In much of Asia and the Arabian Gulf, it’s about who does the work that locals spurn.
And while I didn’t set out to exclude any group in writing this book, I knew I couldn’t include all of them. The focus on telling stories from the point of view of immigrants and migrant workers meant that, for example, aboriginal people in North America didn’t fit, politically or thematically. Although there’s an overlap between their experiences and those of people on the brown continuum, I felt that trying to tell aboriginal stories within the parameters I had established would be historically inaccurate and insensitive. Aboriginal people have been, and still are, at the receiving ends of (im)migration waves to their native lands.
In deciding who to write about and who to leave out, I created a simple formula: Has the cultural, national, regional or religious community you come from reached a crisis point in the host country? Is that country, be it in North America, the Caribbean, Asia or Europe, experiencing some kind of moral panic about your presence in its midst? If you answered yes to both questions and you’re not European white, African American, aboriginal or East Asian, then congratulations (or is it commiseration?), you’re brown. Perhaps you can and do pass for white when you feel like it. Good for you, and shame on you. Millions can’t and don’t. They carry their brownness everywhere they go, and sometimes lose their lives because of it.
Hundreds of construction workers are dying every year in the Gulf States because their skin colour and economic desperation (and the two are related) matter little to their Arab employers, whose wealth has confused their moral compass. Indonesian and Filipina maids are beaten, exploited, raped and forced to give up their children because their ethnicity, class position and skin colour make them less than human. Muslims in both Europe and North America experience the worst of racial profiling and are the subject of dog-whistle politics that have tested the limits of civil liberties and human dignity. Presidential hopefuls cavalierly describe millions of Mexicans as murderers and rapists, regardless of facts or evidence. The list of anti-brown discrimination goes on.
When I attended a meeting of a social justice group in Phoenix in the summer of 2015, I noticed a collage painting with the words “Brown Is Beautiful.” It got me thinking. Brown may indeed be beautiful, but the general picture ain’t pretty. I believe, however, that it’s necessary—imperative, even—to stop treating the various experiences in the brown continuum as isolated and to begin to see the common threads in them. Those who believe that we will join the Irish, Italians and East European Jews in overcoming racial discrimination and working our way to whiteness have forgotten (or chosen to ignore) the pesky colour question.
Our brown skin will always act as an impediment, even if we cream and laser-peel our way out of it. Sometimes you really can’t wash the brown away.