What Color is Brown?

Brown is neither black nor white.

Brown is the in-between color. It’s the color that many people like me, from South Asia, tend to be. Brown, I feel, is the color of Not Sure Where and Why. It’s my color, the lens through which I see the world.

I don’t mean I’m lost. No, I’m very much situated. Situated in transit, that is. Brown is the color of people who have often made journeys of their own will, not forced or forcing others, like the black and the white, slaves and slavers, across the Atlantic. Brown sailors, brown merchants, brown travelers were crisscrossing the known world since at least the Middle Ages. I am the future they were building, where a brown girl crosses oceans to make a new, fantastic life in foreign lands, and never gets over what she left behind.

Brown is the color of invisibility, especially in these United States. My kind of brown people are almost unnoticed in a country staging a half-millennium-long war between white and black. We are so beautifully invisible—or mostly were—that white people have even crowned us as the Model Minority. We supposedly shame other colors that don’t know how to be quiet, polite, not too much trouble. Brown has a special little place in the hearts of the powers that be because it is so nice and cooperative, unlike the color black.

A brown girl is the color of compromise. In my homeland, India, the brown girl is the middle ground. She knows her value on the love and marriage market is much lower than that of the pink-white girl, so she bustles to make herself useful in other ways: she works harder, she talks less, she stays away from certain colors. When she finds love or a husband she is more grateful—or is supposed to be—than the pink-white girl who can quote her own price.

Same thing here in my second continent. I am not as threatening to white people as black girls and not as attractive as white girls. I don’t remind white people of things that happened that they feel guilt or shame about. I’m the compromise here as well. I am easier to like, to befriend, to ‘accept.’ After all, I’m from a place where the British, when they first landed, found the people a relief because the ‘orientals’ were not ‘savages,’ like the Africans, but ‘noble savages.’ I’m from those people who’ve already had some training in getting along with white people.

Brown is the color of a study: a brown study. Brown is the color of parole for good behavior. Brown is the real Other.

Brown is my color.