Beyond Brownness: Why do Filipinos need to be brown?
By Michelle Gan
Conversations around brownness in the Filipino community are not new. In 2016, Los Angeles-based actress Asia Jackson created the hashtag #MagandangMorenx to address the ways “tan and brown-skinned Filipinos are made to feel insecure, ashamed, and embarrassed of the natural color of their skin.” A year later, Manila-based photographer Juro Ongkiko launched Moreno Morena, an Instagram project to celebrate Filipinos with dark skin. These projects addressed the need for Filipinos, both in the Philippines and in the diaspora, to dismantle colorism and abandon our colonizers’ beauty standards.
Even as we challenge colorism in our community, it is worth remembering that many Filipinos are not moreno. Not all Filipinos have been told they need papaya soap and glutathione pills to be desirable. Not all Filipinos have been deemed unsuitable for jobs or bullied for their skin color by fellow kababayan.
Brown skin is beautiful, but not all Filipinos have brown skin. Lighter-skinned Filipinos, including myself, should recognize how we have benefited from beauty standards that privilege light skin. The moreno movement is not for us.
Even as Filipinos continue to grapple with colorism in our homes and communities, more Filipinos are proudly calling themselves brown. Growing up, I even knew Filipino Americans who wished they were darker. For some Filipino Americans, being brown feels like a way to prove that we are Filipino enough.
Many Filipino Americans feel disconnected from the Philippines. Some have never flown the 8,000 miles to visit the region where their family is from. Some no longer have family in the Philippines. Some do not fluently speak or understand their parents’ and grandparents’ first or second languages. Some do not know how good dinuguan and tuyo taste.
All Filipino Americans live in a racist country built on white supremacy, where we are vulnerable to gentrification, workplace discrimination for speaking Filipino languages, and the COVID-19 pandemic. For some of us, calling ourselves brown can be a way to heal the wounds of being nonwhite in a country mainly governed by white people, and part of a journey to unlearning self-hate and connecting with our roots.
Photo via Michelle Gan
Yet, not all Filipinos identify as brown, nor is brown unique to Filipino Americans. In America, brown folks include Latinx, South Asian, and Black communities.
On the subject of being brown, NPR’s Code Switch, a podcast on race and identity, asked its listeners: “should light-skinned Asian Americans...be able to call themselves ‘brown’?” It’s an important question.
Much like moreno, brown connotes a specific set of struggles and inequalities beyond that faced by nonwhite Americans. Brown communities are often discussed in conjunction with Black communities; for example, California State Senator Steven Bradford discusses the need to address police killings of Black and brown people. Black and Hispanic communities are disproportionately affected by police violence and mass incarceration in ways the Filipino community simply is not. What does it mean then, for Filipinos, especially light-skinned Filipinos, to identify as brown in a country where being brown invites racial profiling and violence from police and airport security?
In 2016, three Filipino American professors—E.J.R. David, Ernabel Demillo, and Kevin Nadal—along with two South Asian mental health professionals published “An Open Letter to The 'New York Times' Who Told Brown Asians They Don't Matter" criticizing The New York Times for their poor representation of so-called Brown Asians in discussions of Asian America. They proclaimed “#BrownAsiansExist,” although they did not define who exactly counts as a Brown Asian.
Do all Filipinos count, even lighter-skinned ones like myself? If it’s not about skin color, is it about geography? Is it anybody who is not East Asian, including other Southeast Asians who do not necessarily all have brown skin? The ambiguity around who counts as brown begs the question of why so many Filipino Americans, including David, Demillo, and Nadal, call themselves brown in the first place.
Historian Ellen Wu links the compulsion to use labels like brown to a sense of invisibility. She says, “That feeling that we don't matter, that worse, we're statistically insignificant — in some ways really fuels that desire to have a really concise and meaningful way of talking about ourselves.”
The pain Wu describes of feeling invisible in the country they call home is what drives David, Demillo, and Nadal to grasp for labels like Brown Asian. In their open letter, they describe feeling “unseen, unheard, and unappreciated in this country.”
Data via aapidata.com
Their letter also speaks to the limits of the term Asian American, where the Asian American identity can often exclude South and Southeast Asians in favor of focusing solely on East Asians. Disaggregated data collection on Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) allows for a more nuanced understanding of the term Asian American, pushing us to challenge ideas of Asian American as a monolithic experience. Disaggregated data also provides more context for understanding what differences distinguish those David, Demillo, and Nadal refer to as “Brown Asians.”
For example, from 2013-2015, Filipinos and Indians had the highest median income among all AAPIs, surpassing both the AAPI median household income as well as the U.S. median household income. In that same time period, Filipinos and Indians also had some of the highest rates of employment among AAPIs, exceeding the AAPI employment rate and the U.S. average employment rate.
While the Filipino American experience is definitely not monolithic, and includes domestic workers who have survived labor trafficking, it is worth noting too how Filipino communities compare against other brown Americans. For example, in 2015, while Filipinos in the U.S. had a median annual household income of $80,000, Hispanics had a median annual household income of $45,148. It is important to remember the wide range of ethnic and socioeconomic experiences that live under the umbrella of brownness as we talk about brown people in America.
If you are a Filipino American identifying as brown, ask yourself why it is important to use that label. Is it your skin color? Is it a particular set of lived experiences?
In a country where systemic racism is alive and well, it can feel easy to think that because we are Filipino, we are brown and our struggle is the same as other brown people. It is not.
Calling ourselves brown does not erase the harm we cause to Black and brown communities. We should not let our potential brownness obscure our own complicity, including the ways our communities perpetuate anti-Blackness both interpersonally and on a systemic level.This does not mean Filipinos do not get to be brown. Instead, it is a reminder that brownness as an identity has its limits. We should be mindful of the diversity of experiences of brown people. We cannot presume to speak on behalf of brown communities.
We are allowed to simply be Filipino. We do not need to call ourselves brown to understand that there is a shared oppression among all people of color in America, and to act to address racial injustice. We do not need to call ourselves brown to know we belong here.
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Michelle Gan is a writer whose past work includes examining Chicago's history of police torture, the future of food policy in Chicago, and a photo essay of Jackson Park's Wooded Island. She was born and raised in Queens, New York and has called Chicago home for the last six years. Follow her on Instagram at @ganwiththewindd and Twitter at @michellegan_.
Editors: Kathleen Guytingco, Margaret Von Rotz, and Kristine de los Santos, Director of Operations | One Down | kristine@one-down.com
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