Brown (racial classification)

Brown or brown people is a racial and ethnic term. Like black people and white people, it is a term for race based solely on human skin color. According to racialist ideas, the "Brown Man’s Land is the Near and Middle East. The brown world stretches in an immense belt clear across southern Asia and northern Africa, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans".[1]

Bronze skin tones are commonly also placed under the brown racial classification. In Mexico (and Southwestern United States) and the Philippines the term is associated with mestizo peoples; in Brazil it is pardo..

Racialist models

See also: Race (historical definitions), Scientific racism, and Color terminology for race

In the 18th and 19th century, racialist written works proposed geographically based "scientific" differences among "the races." Many of these racial models assigned colors to the groups described, and some included a "brown race" as in the following:

• Early German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach extended Linnaeus' four-color race model by adding the brown race, "Malay race", which included both the Malay division of Austronesian (Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Pattani, Sumatra, Madagascar, Formosans, etc.) and Polynesians and Melanesians of Pacific Islands, as well as Papuans and Aborigines of Australia.[2][3]
• In 1775, "John Hunter of Edinburg included under the label light brown, Southern Europeans, Sicilians, Abyssinians, the Spanish, Persians, Turks and Laplanders, and under the label brown, Tartars, Africans on the Mediterranean and the Chinese."[4]
• Jean Baptiste Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy's five-race scheme differed from Blumenbach's by including Ethiopians in the brown race, as well as Oceanic peoples. Louis Figuier adopted and adapted d'Omalius d'Halloy's classification and also included Egyptians in the brown race.[5]
• In 1915, Donald Mackenzie conceived a "Mediterranean or Brown race, the eastern branch of which reaches to India and the western to the British Isles... [and includes] predynastic Egyptians... [and some populations of] Neolithic man".[6]

Global racial map by eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard in The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, 1920.

• Eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard in his The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) mapped a "brown race" as native to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Caucasus, the Near East, Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Austronesia (Malay race[7]). Stoddard's "brown" is one of five "primary races", contrasting with "white", "black", "yellow" and "Amerindian".[1]
• Due to what he considered the relatively close physical relationship between many populations "from the Red Sea as far as India, including Semites as well as Hamites", Grafton Elliot Smith conceived the Brown Race as a natural extension of Giuseppe Sergi's earlier Mediterranean race concept. In this popular conception, the Brown Race consisted of a joint "Mediterranean-Hamite-Semite" grouping of ancestrally related peoples, into which Elliot Smith included the Proto-Egyptians.[8]

These and other racialist theories have been dismissed scientifically. As a 2012 human biology textbook observes, "These claims of race-based taxonomy, including Coon's claims for homo-sapienation, have been discredited by paleontological and genomic research showing the antiquity of modern human origins, as well as the essential genomic African nature of all living human beings."[9]

Subdivisions

In the 19th century, the notion of a single "brown people" was sometimes superseded by multiple "brown peoples." Cust mentions Grammar in 1852 denying that there was one single "brown race", but in fact several races speaking distinct languages.[10] The 1858 Cyclopaedia of India and of eastern and southern Asia[11] notes that Keane was dividing the "brown people" into quaternion: a western branch that he termed the Malay, a north-western group that he termed the Micronesian, and the peoples of the eastern archipelagos that he termed the Maori and the Polynesian.

Ethnic and racial identifier

The appellation "brown people" has been applied in the 20th and 21st centuries to several groups. Edward Telles, a sociologist of race and ethnicity, and Jack Forbes[12] both argue that this classification is biologically invalid. However, as Telles notes, it is still of sociological significance. Irrespective of the actual biological differences amongst humans, and of the actual complexities of human skin coloration, people nonetheless self-identify as "brown" and identify other groups of people as "brown", using characteristics that include skin color, hair strength, language, and culture, in order to classify them.

Forbes remarks upon a process of "lumping", whereby characteristics other than skin color, such as hair color or curliness, act as "triggers" for color categories "even when it may not be appropriate."[12][13]

Ethnicity in South Africa

Main article: Coloureds

In 1950s (and later) South Africa the "brown people" were the Coloureds, referring to those born of multiracial sexual unions out of wedlock. They were distinct from the Reheboth Basters inhabiting Namibia, who were primarily of Khoisan and European parentage. The Afrikaans terms, which incorporate many subtleties of heritage, political agenda, and identity, are "bruin" ("brown"), "bruines" ("browns"), and "bruinmense" ("brown people"). Some South Africans prefer the appellation "bruinmense" to "Colored".[14][15]

The South African pencil test was one example of a characteristic other than skin color being used as a determiner. The pencil test, which distinguished either "black" from "Colored" or "Colored" from "white", relied upon curliness and strength of hair (i.e. whether it was capable of retaining a pencil under its own strength) rather than upon any color factor at all. The pencil test could "trump skin color".[16][17]

Steve Biko, in his trial in 1976, rejected the appellation "brown people" when it was put to him incorrectly by Judge Boshoff:[18]

Boshoff: But now why do you refer to you people as blacks? Why not brown people? I mean you people are more brown than black.

Biko: In the same way as I think white people are more pink and yellow and pale than white.

Boshoff: Quite ... but now why do you not use the word brown then?

Biko: No, I think really, historically, we have been defined as black people, and when we reject the term non-white and take upon ourselves the right to call ourselves what we think we are, we have got available in front of us a whole number of alternatives ... and we choose this one precisely because we feel it is most accommodating.

Penelope Oakes[18] characterizes Biko's argument as picking "black" over "brown" because for Biko it is "the most valid, meaningful and appropriate representation, even though in an individualistic decontextualized sense it might appear wrong" (Oakes' emphasis).

This contrasts with Piet Uithalder, fictional protagonist of the satirical column "Straatpraatjes" (whose actual author was never revealed but who is believed to have been Abdullah Abdurahman) that appeared in the Dutch-Afrikaans section of the newspaper APO between May 1909 and February 1922. Uithalder would self-identify as a Colored person, with the column targeted at a Colored readership, introducing himself as "een van de ras" ("a member of the race") and characterizing himself as a "bruine mens".[14]

Pardos in Brazil

Main article: Pardo Brazilians

In popular use, Brazilians also use a category of moreno m. [moˈɾenu], morena f. [moˈɾenɐ], lit. 'swarthy', from mouro, Portuguese for 'Moor', which were perceived as people with darker phenotypes than Indigenous Europeans, so a moreno or morena is a person with a "Moorish" phenotype), which is extremely ambiguous, as it can mean "dark-haired people", but is also used as a euphemism for pardo, and even "Black". In a 1995 survey, 32% of the population self-identified as moreno, with a further 6% self-identifying as moreno claro ("light moreno"). 7% self-identified as "pardo".[13]

A comprehensive study presented by the Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research found that on average, 'white' Brazilians have >50% European genomic ancestry, whereas 'black' Brazilians have 17.1% European genomic ancestry. It concluded that "The high ancestral variability observed in Whites and Blacks suggests that each Brazilian has a singular and quite individual proportion of European, African and Amerindian ancestry in his/her mosaic genomes. Thus, the only possible basis to deal with genetic variation in Brazilians is not by considering them as members of color groups, but on a person-by-person basis, as 190 million human beings, with singular genome and life histories".[19]

Use in Canada

Relating to brown identity, the popular usage of the term in Canada refers to individuals of South Asian ancestry.[20]

Use in the United States

"Brown" has been used as a term in popular culture for some South Asian Americans, Hispanic and Luso Latinos either as a pejorative term or sometimes for self-identification, as with brown identity. Judith Ortiz Cofer notes that appellation varies according to geographical location, observing that in Puerto Rico she is considered to be a white person, but in the United States mainland, she is considered to be a "brown person."[21] Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, identified himself as a brown Arab-American in an opinion piece criticizing the United States Census for forcing self-identified brown persons to identify as white.[22] The term "Brown American" has been used both as a term of insult and as self-identification in referring to Filipino Americans.[23]

See also

• Racism
• Discrimination based on skin color
• Melting pot

References

1. Stoddard, Lothrop (1920). The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Charles Scribner's Sons. Brown Man’s Land is the Near and Middle East. The brown world stretches in an immense belt clear across southern Asia and northern Africa, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans
2. Jane Desmond (2001). Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. University of Chicago Press. p. 54. ISBN 0-226-14376-7.
3. John G. Jackson (1938). Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization: A Critical Review of the Evidence of Archaeology,... New York, N.Y.: The Blyden Society.
4. Bernasconi, Robert. Race Blackwell Publishing: Boston, 2001. ISBN 0-631-20783-X
5. Joseph-Anténor Firmin and Antenor Firmin (2002). The Equality of the Human Races. Asselin Charles (translator) and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (contributor). University of Illinois Press. p. 17. ISBN 0-252-07102-6.
6. Mackenzie, Donald A. Myths of Babylonia and Assyria Montana:Kessinger Publishing, 2004. ISBN 1-4179-7643-8
7. "Early Classification of Nature". Understanding Race.org. Archived from the original on 18 June 2013. Retrieved 13 January 2018.
8. A. H. Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, A. C. Haddon (2011). Man: Past and Present. Cambridge University Press. p. 478. ISBN 978-0521234108.
9. Cameron, Noel; Barry Bogin (2012-06-08). Human Growth and Development. Academic Press. ISBN 9780123838827.
10. Robert Needham Cust (1878). A Sketch of the Modern Languages of the East Indies. Trübner & co. p. 13.
11. Edward Balfour (1976). The Encyclopaedia Asiatica, Comprising Indian Subcontinent, Eastern and Southern Asia. Cosmo Publications. p. 315.
12. Forbes, Jack D. (March 2, 1993). Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252063213 – via Google Books.
13. Edward Eric Telles (2004). "Racial Classification". Race in Another America: the significance of skin color in Brazil. Princeton University Press. pp. 81–84. ISBN 0-691-11866-3.
14. Mohamed Adhikari (2005). Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Colored Community. Ohio University Press. pp. 26, 163–169. ISBN 0-89680-244-2.
15. Gerald L. Stone (2002). "The lexicon and sociolinguistic codes of the working-class Afrikaans-speaking Cape Peninsula colored community". In Rajend Mesthrie (ed.). Language in South Africa. Cambridge University Press. p. 394. ISBN 0-521-53383-X.
16. David Houze (2006). Twilight People: From Mississippi to South Africa and Back. University of California Press. p. 134. ISBN 0-520-24398-6.
17. Birgit Brander Rasmussen (2001). The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Duke University Press. p. 133. ISBN 0-8223-2740-6.
18. Penelope Oakes (1996). "The Categorization Process: Cognition and the Group in the Social Psychology of Stereotyping". In W. P. (William Peter) Robinson and Henri Tajfel (ed.). Social Groups and Identities: developing the legacy of Henri Tajfe. Routledge. ISBN 0-7506-3083-3.
19. "Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research – DNA tests probe the genomic ancestry of Brazilians". Scielo.br. Retrieved 2014-04-18.
20. Sumartojo, Widyarini. "My kind of Brown": Indo-Canadian youth identity and belonging in Greater Vancouver (PhD thesis) (Archived 2014-10-19 at WebCite).
21. Pauline T. Newton (2005). "An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer". Transcultural Women Of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 161. ISBN 0-7546-5212-2.
22. Bayoumi, Moustafa (14 February 2019). "I'm a brown Arab-American, and the US census refuses to recognize me". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 March 2020.
23. Reyes, Bobby M. (May 14, 2007). "How Filipinos Came to Be Called the "Brown Americans" - MabuhayRadio". Mabuhay Radio. Retrieved March 13, 2020.

Further reading

• Alexander Winchell (1890). "XX. Genealogy of the Brown Races". Preadamites: Or, A Demonstration of the Existence of Men Before Adam. S. C. Griggs and company. xvii et seq.