Brown people

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Brown people is a political, racial, ethnic, societal, and cultural classification, similar to black people and white people. The classification bears little relation to actual skin colour. The use of the word "brown", according to Forbes,[1] is an "unsatisfactory use" of an "overworked word", relating to peoples whose skin colours not all cultures even agree upon the colour for. The word is symbolic, rather than descriptive, just as a "'greengrocer' sells 'greens' which are often not green at all (but which can be purplish, grayish, reddish, multicolored, and so on)". Forbes makes the same point about "white" and "black".

Historically, the appellation "brown people" has been applied by various people to a wide range of disparate, and disconnected, groups of people. From The Enlightenment to the 19th century, it was part of a five-colour system of racial classification. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the appellation "brown people" has been applied to various groups of people in various parts of the world, both unofficially and officially.

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[edit] Historical concepts

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

Anthropologists during The Enlightenment defined five human races: Yellows (East Asians), Reds (Native Americans), Whites (Europeans), Browns (indigenous Australians, Asian Indians, Southeast Asians like Malays, Filipinos, Indonesians, Hispanics and Thais), and Blacks (Africans).[2] Carolus Linnaeus original model had just four races, white, yellow, red, and black. His protege, anthropology founder Johann Blumenbach, completed his mentor's colour-coded race model by adding the brown race, "Malay", for Malaysians, Polynesians and Melanesians of Pacific Islands, and for aborigines of Australia.[2][3][4] Debates in the scientific racism movement concerning the repartition and exact number of "races" continued through-out the 19th century.

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]

By the 19th century, the notion of a single "brown people" was being overthrown. Cust[8] mentions Grammar in 1852 denying that there was one single "brown race", but in fact several races speaking distinct languages. The 1858 Cyclopaedia of India and of eastern and southern Asia[9] 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.[10]

By the 20th century, at least as far as ethnography was concerned, the concept of a "brown people" as part of a five colour system of racial classification had been largely supplanted by far more complex systems[citation needed]. In 1900, Joseph Deniker published a racial classification system that comprised six grand divisions, seventeen divisions, and twenty-nine races.[4]

[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. (Forbes,[1] 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'".)

Both Forbes and Telles point out 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".[1][11]

[edit] Coloureds in South Africa

Main article: Coloured

In 1950s (and later) South Africa the "brown people" were the Coloureds, who were largely, and erroneously, believed to have been the production 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 "brynmense" to "Coloured".[12][13]

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".[14][15]

Stephen Biko, in his trial in 1976, rejected the appellation "brown people" when it was put to him by Judge Boshoff:[16]

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 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[16] 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 targetted at a Coloured readership, introducing himself as "een van de ras" ("a member of the race") and characterizing himself as a "bruine mens".[12]

[edit] Mestizo and Hispanic

Main articles: Hispanics and Mestizo

In the United States Hispanic Americans and mestizos are referred to by some as "brown people". 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 indigenous Indian and Spanish heritage has led to a group of people who are, informally, "brown".[17][18]

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.[19]

The 1960s in the United States saw the creation of "brown pride" movements such as the Chicano Movement and La Raza. However, in contrast, many Mestizos assert that they are "white", and reject any assertion that they are not, finding such assertions to be offensive. Contreras, a syndicated newspaper columnist in the United States, states that "in fact, there are a lot of 'brown' people", observing that he sees this colour whenever he looks in a mirror. He states that "[w]e, who trace back to the union of the Spanish Conquistadors and Indian women, can choose one of three paths. [... We] can insist upon being white if, of course, we can prove at least 50.1% white blood. Or we can ignore our white blood and be 'indigenous' and refuse to participate in America [...]. Or we can assert ourselves as a new people, we of brown skin, of Spanish and Indian blood. [...] We are Mexicans and Americans of Mexican descent.".[20][18][17]

[edit] Pardos in Brazil

Main article: Pardo

In Brazil, the "brown people" are the "pardos", one of the official racial classifications ("branco", "pardo", "preto", "amarelo", and "indigena" being Brazilian Portuguese for "white", "(grey) brown", "black", "yellow", and "indigenous", respectively) that have been used by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics since 1950. It is a broad classification that encompasses people of mixed race, mulattos, and assimilated indigenous people ("caboclos"). In the first census in the 20th century to ask a colour question, the census of 1940, the three available categories were white, black, and yellow. Colour was chosen by the census enumerator, and any respondent who did not fit one of the three was classified as "pardo". In the 1950 census, "pardo" was added as a choice, and colour was chosen by the respondent.[11][21]

Unofficially, Brazilians also use a racial classification of "moreno", also meaning "brown". In a 1995 survey, 32% of the population self-identified as "moreno", with a further 6% self-identifying as "moreno claro" ("light brown"). 7% self-identified as "pardo".[11]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c Jack D Forbes (1993). "Loros, Pardos, and Mestizos: Classifing Brown Peoples", Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 025206321X. 
  2. ^ a b Stephen Jay Gould (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. W. W. Norton & Company, 402. ISBN 0-393-31425-1. 
  3. ^ Jane Desmond (2001). Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. University of Chicago Press, 54. ISBN 0226143767. 
  4. ^ a b 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. 
  5. ^ Houghton Mifflin. Definition of Australoid. Yahoo Education.
  6. ^ Bert Thompson (August 1990). "The Origin of Races". Reason & Revelation 10 (8): 33–36. 
  7. ^ 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, 17. ISBN 0252071026. 
  8. ^ Robert Needham Cust (1878). A Sketch of the Modern Languages of the East Indies. Trübner & co., 13. 
  9. ^ Edward Balfour (1976). The Encyclopaedia Asiatica, Comprising Indian Subcontinent, Eastern and Southern Asia. Cosmo Publications, 315. 
  10. ^ William Wyatt Gill (1892). The South Pacific and New Guinea Past and Present with Notes on the Hervey Group. Charles Potter, 6. 
  11. ^ a b c Edward Eric Telles (2004). "Racial Classification", Race in Another America: the significance of skin color in Brazil. Princeton University Press, 81–84. ISBN 0691118663. 
  12. ^ a b Mohamed Adhikari (2005). Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Ohio University Press, 26,163–169. ISBN 0896802442. 
  13. ^ Gerald L. Stone (2002). "The lexicon and sociolinguistic codes of the working-class Afrikaans-speaking Cape Peninsula coloured community", in Rajend Mesthrie: Language in South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 394. ISBN 052153383X. 
  14. ^ David Houze (2006). Twilight People: From Mississippi to South Africa and Back. University of California Press, 134. ISBN 0520243986. 
  15. ^ Birgit Brander Rasmussen (2001). The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Duke University Press, 133. ISBN 0822327406. 
  16. ^ a b 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: Social Groups and Identities: developing the legacy of Henri Tajfe. Routledge. ISBN 0750630833. 
  17. ^ a b Raoul Lowery Contreras (2003). Jalapeno Chiles, Mexican Americans and Other Hot Stuff: A Peoples' Cultural Identity. iUniverse, 39. ISBN 0595292569. 
  18. ^ a b George Eaton Simpson and J. M. Yinger (1985). "Minority family patterns and intermarriage", Racial and Cultural Minorities: An Analysis of Prejudice and Discrimination. Springer, 301. ISBN 0306417774. “In the eastern states, numerous groups of people of mixed descent reside. These mestizos are known by such names as Jackson Whites (New York and New Jersey) [...] and Melungeons (Tennessee). In Virginia, there are many groups known as Rumps, Issues, Cubans, and Brown People [...] Many Mestizos think of themselves as Whites and resent any suggestion that they are not white.” 
  19. ^ Pauline T. Newton (2005). "An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer", Transcultural Women Of Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 161. ISBN 0754652122. 
  20. ^ Scott Sernau (2005). "Challenging the system: Social movements", Worlds Apart: social inequalities in a global economy. Pine Forge Press, 319. ISBN 1412915244. 
  21. ^ David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (2002). Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses. Cambridge University Press, 63–64. ISBN 0521004276. 

[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] See also

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