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 their 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.I picked up Brown because it recently won the prestigious Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing here in Canada, and having been assured (*more on this is a moment) that it is both important and an enjoyable read, I thought it might be right up my alley. But as that opening quote shows, author Kamal Al-Solaylee takes a very broad view of who qualifies as “brown”, and as he doesn't focus on any particular ethnic group (he covers Filipinos, Sri Lankans, North Africans, Mexicans) and tries to be as broad when discussing religious groups (he notes which groups are Hindu or Christian, but does take particular issue with Islamophobia), it would seem that his main focus is economic: As poor or displaced people from the “Global South” attempt to find a better life in more highly developed economies, they are taken advantage of by those who have the power to withhold the rights of citizenship or a decent wage or basic safety. We (lighter-skinned citizens of the destination countries) don't feel bad, according to Al-Solaylee, because, like brown people themselves, we've been conditioned our whole lives to equate lighter with better and “brown” with filth (but, hey, at least brown is, socially, a step above black). This book is packed full of interesting stories and interviews and statistics, and I'm not arguing against its overall impressiveness, but I never really got a handle on Al-Solaylee's thesis; it has a whiff of the strawman about it. People should read it anyway. To return to how I heard about Brown, I read this article about it winning the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize in The National Post :
It already enjoys a high critical reputation, and it is perfectly matched to its historic moment. But you may, particularly if you’re a white reader, hear a voice in your hindbrain saying “Oh, a book about race? I’ll save the 30 bucks and just punch myself in the face.” No no no. Brown is just a good book – intimate, learned, genial, clever. That’s all: it’s a good book that will last a while. It is probably an important book, too, but I want you to know you can go ahead and overlook the nutritional value.By saying I read The National Post, non-Canadians should understand that I'm saying I'm a conservative (which in Canada really means centrist, not skinhead), so not only do I bristle when Al-Solaylee uses bias-laced adjectives (Bobby Jindal is “ultraconservative” and a collection of progressive essays is “vital”), but I can't quite get worked up over his case for colour-based economic discrimination: It is horrifying to learn that nearly one foreign worker a day dies in Qatar while building the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, and of course I don't support the abuse of Filipina maids in Hong Kong or Sri Lankan nannies in Turkmenistan, but whether it's one of these sponsored foreign workers who goes underground to take their chances on unregulated cash jobs, or the Algerian who sneaks into Paris to sell fruit, or the Mexican who walks across the desert looking for restaurant work in the United States, once a person decides to circumvent the rules of immigration, that person can't then expect the rights and privileges of a documented, tax-paying citizen. I honestly don't know what it means that all of these people can be lumped by Al-Solaylee under the umbrella term “brown”. Do I really support the deportation of illegals for the same reason the following was named the ugliest colour in the world?
Brown is divided into three parts: The first covers the history of “colourism” and how even people of colour learn to rank themselves (and each other) on a shade scale; I thought it was interesting that Brazil recognises 300 official colour designations, but balk at Al-Solaylee stating that American television has seen a whitening/unaccenting of Latino actors from the days of Desi Arnaz and Ricardo Mantalban to today's Sofia Vergara and America Ferrera (they all seem equally light-skinned to me and Sofia's accent is the thickest of the bunch – and note I only balk because if I don't agree with the little stuff, I can't agree with the big). The second part covers how brown people are used as labour in other nonwhite countries; and again, while I have a problem with people staying and working in a country illegally, my bigger issue with this section is that there's no real insight into why these people were forced to leave home and family to go work abroad in the first place; if all the exploited labour is coming from “brown” countries, how can those countries be fixed? The final section covers the discrimination faced by brown people in Britain, France, America, and Canada; and while the chapter on the US primarily focusses on illegal Mexicans, the others are about Islamophobia – seen as an unfair generalisation in the aftermath of homegrown terrorist attacks; with which I can agree in general. I liked that Al-Solaylee travelled to all of these countries to seek personal stories, and he definitely put a human face on his statistics.
Al-Solaylee would be from the opposite end of the political spectrum from me (which in Canada, also makes him a centrist), so he spends a lot of ink on the scary decade under a Conservative government and how they used a creeping fear of Muslims as a wedge issue to stir up their base. Being from Toronto, that's where Al-Solaylee sampled for tales of discrimination, and while I agree that Project Thread turned out to be a pointless witchhunt that unfairly stigmatised innocent men, he hardly paints a clear picture of the situation in Canada by narrowing his focus so completely. By leaving out any mention of the browning of the west coast, or Quebec's designation as a distinct society that sees them unaccommodating to “others”, and especially, by making zero mention of our own homegrown and brown-skinned terrorist who murdered an unarmed soldier before shooting up Parliament, Al-Solaylee loses any sense of objectivity for me: by cherrypicking stories to fit his premise about Canada, I was left wondering where this happened in the chapters about countries I'm not intimately familiar with.
My daughter's boyfriend's parents are currently selling their house, and apparently, the much despised next door neighbour came to them and said, “Just don't sell to anyone brown, okay?” (It was reported today that the average price of a new detached home in Toronto is now $1.8 million. As we live within an hour of Toronto's downtown, we've essentially become commutable to the city and a growing portion of those coming out our way are, indeed, brown.) This was told to me because it is understood that I would be disgusted with the neighbour: I may be conservative but I am not a bigot; why would I care about the colour of my neighbours? However, and I can't be alone here, I had two different reactions to current events of late: A brown terrorist blows himself up at a pop concert and I am unsurprised to learn that he was a radicalised Muslim; learning that he was known to police seems to invalidate Al-Solaylee's point that it's unfair for Britain to focus on the Muslim community when searching for potential threats. And last week, when the brown driver of a car that plowed through a crowd in NYC turned out to be a mentally disturbed Navy veteran, I didn't think of the attack as terrorism; probably a case of lack of mental health support for returning veterans. Both were premeditated attacks by brown men, but because one of them was a Muslim, I did put them in separate mental categories. I had hoped that reading Brown would help to clarify this dissonance, but Al-Solaylee went in a different direction. People should read it anyway.
I don't often bother to add links for further reading, but this book reminded me of so many others:
Scaachi Koul wrote the Globe & Mail review for Brown, reminding me that she covered much of the same ground about brownness in her recent One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter.
Sunjeev Sahota describes a year in the lives of a group of undocumented Sikhs living and working in England in The Year of the Runaways .
David Bergen wrote about a near-future world in which brown people are exploited both at home and when they make their way to an even greater wealth-divided America in Stranger.
And Moshin Hamid's subtle subtext in Exit West is that the brown people are coming whether we like it or not; borders are an imaginary construct and how dare we put up barriers to those who simply want to improve their lives?
