…are you open to the possibility that things actually haven’t changed, just that you were blissfully ignorant and completely wrong?
Well, the important thing is that this thread is now about you.
…oh grow the fuck up.
Here in Chicago, I hear both references to Black and Brown communities fairly regularly. Just looking through my Facebook friends posts, I see this:
As a Black Woman who’s father is an immigrant I fight for the rights of all marginalized groups. I’ve marched with, voted for, and donated to causes that help all my Brown brothers and sisters get the rights they deserve. I show up and show out for these causes and I hope you show up for us as well.
and this:
On 26th Street in Little Village trying to #IncreaseThePeace and promote Black & Brown Unity!
and this:
Brown PPL for BLACK POWER.
Little village, chicago
and this:
Anna M López and I will be on WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station talkin bout our FB group; VACCINATE ABUELA CHICAGO and taking care of our Black & Brown elders! Tune in between 8:30am-9am CST!
And so on and so forth. And used in casual speech. And used by South Asians and Middle Easterners. It’s a perfectly normal descriptor/identifier to me, at least at my little corner of the US, although also have heard it from South Asians/Middle Easterners from Toronto.
My local newspaper never did that, until Kamala Harris got the Veep nomination. I’m not the only person who noticed this.
BTW, there are some cases of newspapers autocorrecting the word “black” to “African American,” when it was not contextually appropriate, and of course, on a related note, this bizarre gaffe. Mr. Gay, who is heterosexual, actually thought it was funny.
Although I thought the tweet that @MrDibble posted fit the kind of ironic usage that I was familiar with, it’s obvious from some of the other links that have subsequently been posted that you are quite correct about this (including in the U.K.)
Interesting, thanks! I lived for several years in Mexico, and have continuing professional and personal experiences and connections with US Latino communities, so it’s odd I’ve missed this. Maybe I just never noticed what was there all along (I’ll keep an eye out for it from now on), or maybe by chance it’s not used among the folks I’ve interacted with.
I just asked my wife (of South Asian origins), and she surprised me by saying she has heard “brown” (or “Brown”) used for the Indian-American “community,” such as it is.
I’ve seen it on billboards, as well, not just Facebook posts, but it seems to show up most often in the community activism circles, and NPR. But, as I said, I do hear it in casual speech as well.
I work a lot in the South Asian community, so, like I said, I also hear it there, and there definitely is a strong South Asian community (or communities) here in the Chicago area.
Cool.
One excuse for me is that the “casual speech” would likely be conducted in Spanish. 
(Many would say la raza, or mi gente…)
For example, a mural on the South Side:
I’ll be darned. And I’ve lived there, too! (Not for 30 years).
I feel the terminology or at least the more mainstream nature of it is somewhat recent, like the last decade or two, but I couldn’t say for certain.
My own feeling is that I’m very uncomfortable with a capitalized White. It seems to affirm the claims of white supremacists that there is a white ethnicity that has a white culture and should be afforded the recognition and deference that other ethnicities get. Now, Black is definitely an ethnicity in the United States, mostly because of a history of systematic racism. But, White … nooooo … I’m not comfortable recognizing that as a single ethnicity. It’s a race, because we live in a society based on the racist notion of the existence of a white race, but it’s not an ethnicity.
I agree that I would never choose to identify myself a White person with a capital W without context; but it seems perfectly correct to say that I am a beneficiary of White privilege, or to talk about what it means to be non-White. I guess it’s the difference between acknowledging the existence of something as opposed to “affirming” it as a virtue.
I’m not sure that a Somali immigrant, a black physician from Vermont, and a black fisherman from Louisiana have more in common than two random white folks from let’s say North Dakota. Reducing the culture of a people to skin color seems bigoted.
Yes, America’s history of systemic racism based on skin color is indeed bigoted. Good job.
Are these some of your best friends?
None of them are actually. But if they were, I wouldn’t be treating them as if their skin color was their defining feature nor would I reduce them to a caricature in order to virtue signal in response to the death of George Floyd or the unrest that followed.
Good thing nobody here was suggesting that.
You met them but you don’t like them?