I don’t have full context there, but from what I can see it’s in the context of a “token brown person for woke PC purposes” type of conversation. It looks like exactly the mocking ironic usage that I was talking about. It’s the implication that the ignorant person the tweet is directed at (so far as i can tell it’s a hypothetical “you” rather than directed at a specific person) sees a diversity of ethnicities as an undifferentiated mass of “brown” people defined only by non-Whiteness.
I’ve seen Brown used a lot, but I’m in SoCal, and the usage is almost exclusively for Mexican-Americans and people from Central and South America.
I wouldn’t characterize that as ironic usage, myself. And no, that tweet is directed at a particular real person, the Andrew Salter he @ed.
As a Brit who is well attuned to British irony and sarcasm, I’m fairly sure you’re wrong.
I haven’t lived in the U.K. for 15 years, so I’m certainly open to the possibility that things may have changed. And of course it may be completely different in other English-speaking cultures. But so far as I’m aware calling someone a “brown person” in the U.K. is so highly offensive that it’s a caricature, it would be assumed to be ironic unless the speaker were a drunk racist 80-year-old. In everyday speech (I don’t know about academic terminology) I don’t think any group self-identifies as “brown” except in the ironic manner (to mock ignorance) that I think is exemplified in that tweet.
The world is far more than just the USA. The rationale for capitalizing the b in black fails to take that into account and leads to ridiculous contradictions. I don’t capitalize adjectives if the adjective is a color. Just like I wouldn’t capitalize the ‘f’ in female or the ‘m’ in male. People are far more complex than an arbitrary identity and groups are far too complex to lazily reduce them to a supposed homogenous set aside from the very limited property that qualifies them as members of the group to begin with.
To suggest that there is a vast array of properties for a diverse group of people that are common merely because of the commonality of skin tone strikes me as a harmful stereotype. The real reason major press and media took the stance they did was not because of deep reasoning. It was because it was an opportunity to jump on a band wagon after the murder of George Floyd.
I don’t think he’s being entirely ironic. There is, on one level, the whole, “Racists can’t tell the difference between someone who’s Hispanic, versus Indian, versus Arab. To them, we’re all ‘brown’ people,” in which context identifying as “brown” would be ironic. But there’s also, “Given that racists can’t tell the difference between different ‘brown’ people, there’s a commonality of experience with being non-white in a predominantly white society that is actually valid and useful for building alliances and sharing resources between different minority groups.” And if you want a label to describe that group of people, well, “brown” is right there…
I don’t recall ever hearing anyone refer to themselves non-ironically as “brown” as a singular identifier, but I have heard lots of unironic references to “brown people” as an unironic umbrella term for people who have been subject to racism against non-whites. I think it might be on the same trajectory that “queer” went through, from ironically “reclaiming” a slur, to being a useful catch-all term for allied groups with similar, but not identical, civil rights concerns.
…I’m brown. I’m Samoan. And Māori. We’ve called each other brown since-forever.
You would be wrong.
Here is a video about a movie called “Brown Boys” that includes plenty of uses of the word “brown” unironically.
I’m confused. Which ones?
I would, except for the fact that you conveniently clipped this part of what I said to enable your smug gotcha:
The Washington Post uses both Black and White.
The Washington Post will uppercase the B in Black to identify the many groups that make up the African diaspora in America and elsewhere.
The use of Black is a recognition and acknowledgment not only of the cultural bonds and historical experiences shared by people of African heritage, but also the shared struggles of the descendants of enslaved people, families who immigrated generations ago and more recent immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean and other corners of the world.
Stories involving race show that White also represents a distinct cultural identity in the United States. In American history, many White Europeans who entered the country during times of mass migration were the targets of racial and ethnic discrimination. These diverse ethnicities were eventually assimilated into the collective group that has had its own cultural and historical impact on the nation. As such, White should be represented with a capital W.
…full quotes, for context:
I didn’t “smugly” clip a single sentence that recontextualised what it was you were saying. I clipped a whole lot of sentences, as is common practice when posting on the internet. It was plainly obvious what you were arguing, and a single disclaimer won’t change that.
This is an international board, and your experiences in the UK are valid. But don’t get offended when brown people (who are still living with the legacy of UK colonialism) tell you plainly that you’ve gotten it wrong about brown people.
Which neatly encapsulates the idea that the waves of e.g. Irish, Italian, and German immigrants which faced discrimination did not become Capital-W white until they’d been assimilated. Before that they were Those People, something unpalatable to White company. Regardless of the fact that nobody can tell e.g. immigrant Irish skin from e.g. native English skin. Nor immigrant German from native Dutch.
Somebody upthread mentioned “a nice shade of mocha” a couple centuries from now. If we get there (and speed the day!) I guess we’ll all be Capital-W White then, despite there then being zero people actually the shade of current lower-case-w white people.
That’s a sad commentary on what stupid monkeys we collectively are.
It is completely unambiguous from what I wrote that I’m talking specifically about my own experiences the U.K. I explicitly acknowledged (more than once) that other cultures are different. You clipped those parts and misrepresented what I said as a universal claim in order to tell me I’m wrong.
I’m not going to dispute this further with you. People can read.
I’m interested in what you have to say from a different cultural perspective, but you make it difficult to listen when you persistently feel the need to be such a jerk about it.
…what part of this post do you consider being a jerk?
As I said, the part where you feel the need to misrepresent me as making a universal claim in order to tell me I’m wrong; rather than just adding your own perspective to the conversation.
…I didn’t misrepresent you.
Brown people call each other brown in the UK.
None of that was ironic. You are just wrong. Brown people aren’t black. They aren’t white. We are brown. That’s why we call ourselves brown. It really is as simple as that.
And you still seem incapable of adding anything to the conversation except in a jerkish confrontational manner.
How many disclaimers does someone have to make about the fact that they are talking about their own cultural experience and are open minded to hearing new information and other perspectives before you’re prepared to interact with them without being a jerk?
I guess I have learned that I can accurately call you a brown jerk without racial disparagement.
…its the fucking pit. What the fuck are you expecting?
How about just admitting that your anecdotal experiences don’t appear to be reflective of the reality of the situation?
Why are you being so jerkish about this?
This was always a racist bait thread and it was started in the pit and I’ve got every fucking right to be angry about it. And if you are going to be spouting off blatantly ignorant opinions here and you think “you are wrong” is being jerkish then I will politely ask you to “take off the tone police hat” and kindly fuck all the way off.
I wonder how I might do that? Perhaps I could have said something like, um…
I alternate between caps for black depending on the context. I capitalize white only when referring to a certain subset of white people. I think it’s handy in referencing those who are starting to think, act, and vote as if they were members of a minority group, which they are.