Andrea Canaan’s “Brownness” and realizing your role in oppression
Andrea Canaan is an African American feminist who has written several papers on oppression, one of which is “Brownness.” In this paper Canaan describes how she has experienced life as a brown person. In her first paragraph she states, “I have lived my years inside brown skin that didn’t show the bruises, the wounds to anyone.” So she is basically admitting that indeed she is hurt but this “bruising” is internal and unseen by others because she has held her suffering in. This bruising and pain she explains comes from the oppression she has experienced growing up both as a person of color and a female. Now I ask you, have you ever felt oppressed? If so did you express your feelings upon this oppression or did you hold it in like Canaan did for several years?
Normally when human beings face a problem in their life their first instinct is to question the reasoning behind it and question who is at fault for it. It is therefore our natural instinct and a coping mechanism to put the blame on something or someone else besides ourselves. Like most human beings Andrea Canaan went through the process of putting the blame for her oppression on others, and although these “others” including her community, white men, white females, and so on did have some fault she was ultimately at fault for her situation.
First, she blamed the brown people for transmitting the message of racism. She describes how her community is seen as “lazy, shiftless, poor, non-human, dirty, abusive…” in comparison to their counterpart which is the white community. She continues on to say how the brown people are the ones most at fault for this oppression. She believes this because, when they were segregated they simply accepted what they were given and internalized how outsiders perceived them. So they would act out what the white people told them they were, which was an inferior position; So no matter how hard the brown tried they would not be as good as the white as long as this internalized thought existed. They would also make jokes about racism and oppression so they themselves took away from the seriousness of the problem. She also describes how African Americans and most oppressed people take on the role of victim and how this role is weak and allows for more and more oppression to occur. So basically she says the oppressed need to stop playing the role of victim and start realizing that things will not change until we start changing ourselves. She continues pointing fingers and blaming the white woman, the white man, and the brown man for her bruising and pain. She gives reasons for why they are at fault and basically all these reasons come down to there being an ideology that one person’s liberty must come at the cost of another’s. This relates to bell hook’s article, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women.” Because what Canaan describes in her writing is that not only she feels oppressed but in many ways her “oppressors” the white women, and brown men are also oppressed and they should unite to fight this oppression. However, they cannot create a sisterhood like bell hooks said because they focus too much on their differences instead of embracing them and coming together to crush the barriers between them.
Finally, she says that she has come to realize who she is; A women of color and that for these factors she is oppressed, but that this is only so because she has given others the power to oppress her. She says she has oppressed her self by putting up this front of strength when truly she was hurting inside. She also realizes that she has a lot of good qualities like knowledge, but that she has hid them, because having knowledge of her situation hurt her so she chose to play dumb and play the victim part. Ultimately however, she decided that she needed to be who she truly was, a smart brown woman even if that meant going against what she had been taught throughout her life and help her community and others realize that we need to be more accepting of each other.
So overall, instead of closing ourselves off we need to bring change into our own life and accept others for who they are and embrace each other to allow better things to come. Therefore, like Chrystos called for in “ I Walk in the History of my People,” we first need to realize and accept that there is racism, sexism, and so on but we need to work against these forces together; And so like the sisterhood bell hooks imagined, we need to stop acting as if we were each others enemy and competitors in life and realize that our liberty does not have to come at the cost of another’s.
