Brown people

Map of indigenous skin color distribution in the world based on Von Luschan's chromatic scale.

Brown people or brown race is a political, racial, ethnic, societal, and cultural classification, similar to black people and white people. Like these, it is a metaphor for race based on human skin color, reflecting the fact that there are shades of skin colour intermediate between "Mediterranean" (skin type IV) and "black" (skin type VI). Consequently, the term includes groups that have no connection other than their intermediate skin tone, especially but not limited to mixed race individuals.

[edit] Historical concepts

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 Near East, Central Asia, South Asia and Austronesia. Stoddard's "brown" is one of five "primary races", contrasting with "white", "black", "yellow" and "Amerindian".

Brunei, Pattani, Singapore, Sumatra.

Carolus Linnaeus original model had just four races, white, yellow, red, and black. His protege, anthropology founder Johann Blumenbach, completed his mentor's color-coded race model by adding the brown race, "Malay", for both the Malay division of Austronesian (Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Pattani, Singapore, Sumatra Madagascar, Formosans, etc.) and Polynesians and Melanesians of Pacific Islands, and for Papuans and Aborigines of Australia.^[1][2] Blumenbach characterized the racial classification scheme of John Hunter when he wrote, "John Hunter reckons seven varieties:... (6) &e., Turks, Abyssinians, Samoiedes and Lapps;"^[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]

Some anthropologists added the brown race back in as an Australoid category (which includes Aboriginal peoples of Australia along with various peoples of southeast and south Asia, especially Melanesia and the Malay Archipelago),^[5] and viewed it as separate from Negroids (often lumping Australoids in with Caucasoids).^[6] Jean Baptiste Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy differed from Blumenbach, 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.^[7]

As surmised by Carleton Coon in 1939, "He [ Giuseppe Sergi ] also made it clear that the so-called Brown Race, in its dolichocephalic and leptorrhine or mesorrhine forms, was for the most part an extension of the same Mediterranean family into southern Asia."^[8][9][10]

By the 19th century, the notion of a single "brown people" was being overthrown. Cust^[11] mentions Grammar in 1852 denying that there was one single "brown race", but in fact several raci speaking distinct languages. The 1858 Cyclopaedia of India and of eastern and southern Asia^[12] 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 archipelagoes that he termed the Maori and the Polynesian. Anthropologists and scholars were at the least dividing the people of the Pacific into the "dark people" and the "brown people". The "dark people" were the inhabitants of the Western Pacific as far as Fiji. The "brown people" were the people inhabiting the islands to the east of Fiji, as far as Easter Island.^[13]

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 Ireland... [and includes] predynastic Egyptians... [and some populations of] Neolithic man".^[14]

[edit] 20th and 21st century concepts

The appellation "brown people" has been applied in the 20th and 21st centuries to several groups, usually mixed race ones. (Jack Forbes,^[15] an expert in the field, in pointing out the disconnection between the colour labels and actual skin colour, observes that "[b]lack and white when mixed as pigments may produce gray, but when 'black' and 'white' humans mix the result is usually some type of 'brown'".)

Edward Telles is another academic in this field. He and Forbes 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 colouration, people nonetheless self-identify as "brown" and identify other groups of people as "brown", using characteristics that include skin colour, hair strength, language, and culture, in order to classify them. Forbes remarks upon a process of "lumping", whereby characteristics other than skin colour, such as hair colour or curliness, act as "triggers" for colour categories "even when it may not be appropriate".^[15][16]

[edit] Coloureds in South Africa

In 1950s (and later) South Africa the "brown people" were the Coloureds, including those born of black-white sexual union out of wedlock. 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 "Coloured".^[17][18]

The South African pencil test is one example of a characteristic other than skin colour being used as a determiner. The pencil test, which distinguished either "black" from "Coloured" or "Coloured" 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 colour factor at all. The pencil test could "trump skin colour".^[19][20]

Stephen Biko, in his trial in 1976, rejected the appellation "brown people" when it was put to him by Judge Boshoff:^[21]

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.

Oakes^[21] 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 Coloured person, with the column targeted at a Coloured readership, introducing himself as "een van de ras" ("a member of the race") and characterizing himself as a "bruine mens".^[17]

[edit] Pardos in Brazil

In Brazil, the "brown people" are the "pardos", one of the skin colour categories ("branco", "pardo", "preto", "amarelo", and "indigena" being Portuguese for "white", "(grey) brown", "black", "yellow", and "indigenous", respectively) that have been used by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics since 1940. It is a broad classification that encompasses people of mixed race, mulattos, and assimilated indigenous people ("caboclos").

In popular use, Brazilians also use a category of "moreno", 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".^[16]

Note that despite "moreno" being commonly used by some uneducated persons as a racial classification (mainly in Brazil),^{[citation needed]} "moreno" is, in fact, the Portuguese equivalent to the English word "brunet(te)". It is used to describe a brown, dark brown or black-haired person as opposed to a blond (loiro/loira/louro/loura) one. In Portugal, it is also used to refer to skin colour; it is used usually referring to a heavily tanned white person. It is often preceded by the adjectives more or less, and is used to compare one person's colour to another.

[edit] Austronesians

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the group that was called the Malayan race (the people now called Austronesians), were traditionally referred to as the brown race.

[edit] Hispanics in the U.S.

In the United States, some Hispanic Americans, mainly mestizos, are referred to by some as "brown people", even though the traditional term mestizos have used for themselves, dating from the 1920s, is the bronze race. There is a strong division over this, however. At opposite ends of the spectrum are those that take pride in calling themselves "brown", and those who assert that there is no such scientific classification and totally reject the idea. In the middle are those that assert that the combination of Amerindian and European heritage has led to a group of people who are, informally, "brown".^[22][23]

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 she is considered to be a "brown person."^[24] This has often been the stereotype of White Anglo-American prejudices that Spanish-speakers within the U.S. are all of one specific color, i.e. dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, due to many past and present Latin American migrants being of mestizo, Amerindian, or other non-caucasian race. Consequently, white Hispanics are often branded as non-white due to their cultural heritage being synonymized with brown race, as well as contrary instances where their heritage is questioned or disregarded because they "look white" or "act white." The U.S. Census Bureau officially designates "Hispanic" as relating to ethnicity independent from race yet census forms asking for race may list "Hispanic or Latino" as an entity separate from white, Native American, two or more races, etc. In addition, Spanish-language media in both Latin America and within the U.S. identifies "Hispanic" as pertaining to Hispanophone culture which includes different races, ethnicities, and ancestries.^[25][26]

The 1960s in the United States saw the creation of "brown pride" movements such as the Chicano Movement and La Raza. However, currently most Hispanic Americans do not refer to themselves as "brown people"^{[citation needed]}, but as hyphenated Americans of a certain national origin.

[edit] South Asian populations

It is said that the racial qualities mentioned by Elliot Smith were exactly the same as those mentioned by Giuseppe Sergi who wrote of the "Mediterranean race". Sergi too spoke of a brown race^[9][10] although he discussed their distribution through Afro-Eurasia. Scientific racism often included the populations of South Asia as blending from the Mediterranean (Europid) to the Australoid (Dravidian) race in a north-to-south gradient.^[8] The term 'Brown' was also used by British Empire as a derogatory term for natives of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and Australia. Later, the term 'Brown' began to be used as descriptor for British people of South Asian origin.

Some Desi or South Asian Americans will identify their race as brown^[27] which Sociologist A. Rajagopal thinks is a result of identifying with Hispanic Americans who are more likely to identify as brown.^[27] Although Indian Americans and Hispanic Americans who identify their race as brown may not identify each other as the same race.^[27]

[edit] See also

• Bronze race
• Colorism
• South Asia
• Brown pride

[edit] References

27. Sofia "Carol" Reyes

[edit] 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.. 

[edit] External links

• The first Asian boat people
• Brown Race