Living a brown life
Living a brown life has so many subtle shades in one’s ordinary worldliness that it’s hardly ever dull.
Mohammad Ali (the legendary boxer) in a famous interview shares his racial quandaries as a child when he asks his mother: “How come is everything white? Why is Jesus white with blonde hair and blue eyes? Angels are white, even the Pope, Mary… Everything bad is black, the black cat is the bad luck, If I threaten you, I’m going to ‘blackmail’ you, why don’t they call it ‘whitemail’, they lie too…” Nothing sums up the predicaments of race faced by non-whites today better than these curious inquiries of a black child.
Barring the antiquity of the idea of racial classification, it is far from obscure. Every non-white person experiences racism, albeit of different degrees and variants. As loathsome as the concept is, it is ironic how the victims of racism in one place are its perpetrators in another. It is fascinating as to how fluid this hierarchy is, except for the whites. As a fair-toned Asian, I cannot deny the relative privilege I enjoy in contrast to my darker-toned nationals. A non-white fair toned individual in South Asia enjoys a sense of privilege that would fall flat when he/she travels to the Middle East or Europe, for example.
I have met racism too, not as blatant and glaring as Mohammad Ali describes it, but rather muted and concealed. I have experienced race, not as a persistent enigma but as brief episodes of epiphanies. When I realized that I was wronged or that I would have been treated differently, were it not for my skin tone or place of birth.
These realizations were not only confined to how others treated me but also how I treated others. My own conduct around people who did or did not speak fluent English or behaved in a particular manner was divergent. Not that I can rid my subconscious mind of my life’s learnings, but to be consciously aware of the indoctrination imposed by society at large, is a relief in itself.
My brown life, and that of so many others, is awash with such contradictions. There is something quite unique in being brown, like the colour palette, it’s neither here nor there. In the racial hierarchy, brown folks are placed just above their darker-toned compatriots. Still, their side of the story is hardly ever told. Perhaps because they are merely ill-treated, not shot down, and that falls a tad bit short of making the news.
Brown folks are spread all over the place. Their abode stretches from the Near / Middle East to Southern Asia and Northern Africa, and they are oh so present in Europe and the Americas. Perhaps this is one reason why they are not a tight-knit group, and their shared predicament is hardly documented or talked about. While we are at it, it’s worth mentioning, how, despite their common misery, how hell-bent South Asian countries are on not living with peace.
Scores of brown people have died at the hands of their fellow-brown men using weapons bought from their ex-colonizers.
Having lived in the Middle East for most of my adult life, I have witnessed racism in generous doses. A person who cannot speak Arabic is referred to as ‘ajam’ which literally translates to mute. It is not uncommon to find job adverts that specify a nationality. The racist segregation of jobs is mind-numbingly vivid, e.g. Phillipono maids, waiters, and nurses, English teachers and managers, Indian drivers, Nepalese and Bangladeshi blue-collar workers. The hierarchy works as follows: locals, followed by neighbouring GCC countrymen, whites, non-white Western passport holders, non-GCC Arabs, brown folks, and blacks. I have stood in line in government hospitals, that too in the emergency ward, where the token machine had 3 categories for patients: Local, GCC, Non-GCC.
As is the case in the rest of the world, racism is not part of the public debate (of whatever general discussion there is) in the region. It’s as if it doesn’t exist. It’s so frustrating to not being able to talk about an experience that you live every day. To live in a place where your work remuneration is determined by your country’s forex rate and the colour of your passport. A land where the laws are not applied equally and where you carry rights by chance, so long as they are not usurped by a local.
Having said this, living a brown life has so many subtle shades in one’s ordinary worldliness that it’s hardly ever dull. From having a loud dad to trying to understand Cardi B’s part in Maroon 5’s ‘Girls Like You’. From not ever officially falling in love in the eyes of your parents yet getting married before 30, to balancing the fine art of staying hip while claiming sobriety from the colonial hangover.
The urge of wanting to topple the curse of racism, of ending the West-led elite capture, and of decolonizing academia after getting an Oxbridge degree is palpable.
The lingering sense of inferiority that colonization infuses in its subjects is perhaps it’s most brutal spinoff. The seeds are sown so deep that it’s impossible to shake oneself past it, worst yet the media and society reassert cultural superiority of the West, leading to growing hipsterism. It strips the locals of their culture, traditions, art, and literature. Within a matter of two generations post-freedom, all the content written in native languages is in jeopardy for vast swathes of land — what a shame! Britain may well in time return the Kohinoor crown jewel but how can one undo the incomprehensible damage to the culture and self-worth of the colonized?
What then is expected of brown people? To shun the colonial past and adopt their native cultures? Or to learn to accept the undeniable superiority of their ex-masters, the uni-cultural world around them, and to soothe their compromised self-worth by tuning into Blues playlist on a Swedish music app?
They can perhaps get started by talking about their shared grievance with their peers, and at the very least stop being perpetrators of the harm caused to them.
