Brown

What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone)

Kamal Al-Solaylee

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781443441452
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing

Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-fiction and the Trillium Book Award

A Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Life, Walrus, CBC Books, Chatelaine, Hill Times, 49th Shelf and Writers' Trust Best Book of the Year

With the urgency and passion of Ta-Nehisi Coates ( Between the World and Me ), the seductive storytelling of J.D. Vance ( Hillbilly Elegy ) and the historical rigour of Carol Anderson ( White Rage ), Kamal Al-Solaylee explores the in-between space that brown people occupy in today's world: on the cusp of whiteness and the edge of blackness. Brown proposes a cohesive racial identity and politics for the millions of people from the Global South and provides a timely context for the frictions and anxieties around immigration and multiculturalism that have led to the rise of populist movements in Europe and the election of Donald Trump.

At once personal and global, Brown is packed with storytelling and on-the-street reporting conducted over two years in ten countries on four continents that reveals a multitude of lives and stories from destinations as far apart as the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, the United States, Britain, Trinidad, France, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Qatar and Canada. It features striking research about the emergence of brown as the colour of cheap labor and the pursuit of a lighter skin tone as a global status symbol. As he studies the significance of brown skin for people from North Africa and the Middle East, Mexico and Central America, and South and East Asia, Al-Solaylee also reflects on his own identity and experiences as a brown-skinned person (in his case from Yemen) who grew up with images of whiteness as the only indicators of beauty and success.

This is a daring and politically resonant work that challenges our assumptions about race, immigration and globalism and recounts the heartbreaking stories of the people caught in the middle.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

A Colour, a Vanished Race, a Metaphor

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 overt...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Brown. Like Me?
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• About the Author
• Also by Kamal Al-Solaylee
• Copyright
• About the Publisher