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Brown Canadians

From EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki

Brown Canadians is a term for multiple ethnic groups as a metaphor for race based solely on human skin colour. The term Brown Canadians is used to describe Canadians who identify as and are perceived to be Brown (racial classification). Used in association with brown identity, the term commonly refers to Canadians of South Asian descent.

The group constitutes a significant minority of the people living in Canada.

Terminology

Brown Canadians have been reported in media, and written of in journalistic, scholarly and artistic works as a distinct group or racial classification in a variety of contexts.[1][2][3][4] Although there can be descriptive overlap,[5] brown people in Canada are usually described as distinct from both indigenous Canadians and black Canadians.[6][7] Outside of domestic identity, Christopher Stonebanks has produced research proposing how brown Canadians in Malawi are more likely to be referred to as Azungu (usually meaning light-skinned foreigner) by native people, rather than Amwenye (Asian) due to them being English-speaking and Westernized South Asian diaspora.[8]

History

19th century

In 1897, a group of soldiers from the Punjab region of South Asia passed through Vancouver during the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.[9] Predominantly settling in British Columbia to work in the forestry industry, South Asians became the first large and established brown community in Canada.

20th century

Predominately focused in British Columbia during the early 1900s, increased South Asian immigration to Canada allowed the brown population in Canada grew to nearly 5,000 by 1908.[10] However, the Continuous journey regulation act of 1908 indirectly halted Indian immigration to Canada, as later evidenced by the infamous 1914 Komagata Maru incident. This prompted many to return to South Asia or immigrate to the USA, resulting an population decline to below 2,000 by the 1914, followed by relative stagnation through much of the early 20th century.[11]

In 1985, Sugith Varughese wrote and starred in CBC Television's Best of Both Worlds, which Varughese described as a film about "brown people in Canada".[12] In 1995, critical of the racial classification, Brian Maracle claimed that the Canadian government wanted to convert indigenous peoples into the category of brown Canadian.[5]

In a 2005 New Letters interview, Bharati Mukherjee proposed how the government's designation of a visible minority had facilitated racial discrimination against brown Canadians.[13] For example, between 2008 and 2012, a Toronto Star investigation reported how brown Canadians had been disproportionately targeted by police.[14]

In 2017, Charmaine Nelson wrote that the experiences of brown Canadians, along with the indigenous peoples of Canada and black Canadians, needed to brought more centrally into the culture of Canada.[15] Author Naben Ruthnum has suggested that brown Canadian writers are somewhat burdened by a perception of a cultural expectation to produce diasporic-based writing, rather than contribute to the mainstream.[16] In 2018, Falen Johnson and Leah-Simone Bowen discussed how their podcast, CBC's The Secret Life of Canada, was influenced by prioritizing the racialized stories of brown, as well as black, and indigenous Canadians.[17]

Academic research

In 2011, a Simon Fraser University-published thesis by academic Wendy Naava Smolash explored how Canadian media contributed to racialized discourse which portrayed brown Canadians within a certain context. [18] Published in Studies in Canadian Literature, a 2012 analysis by Chandrima Chakraborty, of Shani Mootoo's literature, examined the cultural negotiation of identities between brown and white Canadians, as well as other Indian diaspora.[19]

Widyarini Sumartojo's Simon Fraser University-published thesis in 2012 explored brown identity in Greater Vancouver, specifically focusing on South Asian youth in the region.[20]

In academic Ayla Raza's Being “Brown”, which is based on brown identity in the youth of Greater Toronto, the 2014 thesis explores how a shift from skin-based to culture-based racism has been experienced by brown people living in Canada.[21]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Angela Failler (January 17, 2020). "A 35-year-old Air India tragedy suggests Canada will soon forget the Ukraine crash victims". Yahoo News. Would there have been such trouble recognizing the bombing as a national tragedy if the majority of those killed were white rather than brown Canadians?
  2. ↑ Neil A. Sookdeo (2000). Freedom, Festivals and Caste in Trinidad After Slavery: A Society in Transition. Xlibris Corporation. ISBN 978-1401017682. Even if Canadian culture was a variant rather than a duplication of British culture, for the Anglo Trinidadian establishment it were better that Indians became brown Canadians than brown Frenchmen. Search this book on
  3. ↑ Maureen Thompson (2006). "Transforming Community by Redefining Multiculturalism: The Fourth Annual Regent Park Film Festival". FUSE Magazine (Volume 29 ed.). p. 39. I was pulled into the film when the young captain of the team, the child of Indian immigrants, noted that there are no "true" Canadians playing cricket in Toronto. An interesting statement from a boy born and raised in Canada, at what point do Brown and Black Canadians feel we can claim our citizenship?
  4. ↑ Clark Blaise (1984), A North American Memoir: Revenge (Volume 269 ed.), The North American Review, pp. 56–60, We interviewed the more famous victims, attended borough meetings where white citizens, many with accents, stood up to denounce their fellow brown Canadians. "My father fought for the King," cried one impassioned old man. "So did mine," retorted a Sikh.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Brian Maracle (September 11, 1995). "Frustration at Indian politicians is fuelling unrest". Maclean's. For more than a century, Old Man Canada used residential schools, churches and government programs in an effort to turn Indian people into “good little Indians.” It didn't work.
  6. ↑ "Media & Society SOCI 216". Okanagan College. Indian, Pakistani & Sri Lankan Canadians (Brown Canadians); Middle Eastern Canadians (Brown Canadians)
  7. ↑ Justin Ling (September 19, 2019). "Trudeau Won't Wash Off His Blackface Scandal". Foreign Policy. The incarceration rate for black and brown Canadians, as well as indigenous peoples, is wildly disproportionate to their share of the population, as is violence visited upon those communities.
  8. ↑ Christopher Stonebanks (2018). "Reading Shiva Naipaul. A reflection on Brownness and leading an experiential learning project in Malawi". In Phiona Stanley; Greg Vass. Questions of Culture in Autoethnography. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138908642. Although sometimes Brown Canadians have been referred to as “coloured”, “half-caste” and even Black, Brown participants in TPM are rarely called Amwenye by local community when they move in spaces that are connected with Canadians "doing good". Search this book on
  9. ↑ Walton-Roberts, Margaret. 1998. "Three Readings of the Turban: Sikh Identity in Greater Vancouver" (Archive). In Urban Geography, Vol. 19: 4, June. - DOI 10.2747/0272-3638.19.4.311 - Available at Academia.edu and at ResearchGate. p. 316.
  10. ↑ Singh, Hira, p. 94[permanent dead link] (Archive).
  11. ↑ Pg. 79. White Canada Forever. By W. Peter Ward. 2002. McGill, Quebec, Canada. ISBN 978-07735-2322-7 Search this book on .
  12. ↑ Jerry Roberts (2009). Encyclopedia of Television Film Directors. Scarecrow Press. p. 623. ISBN 978-0810861381. Best of Both Worlds was written by and starred Sugith Varughese in a CBC film about what the author called “brown people in Canada.” Search this book on
  13. ↑ Angela Elam (2009). Bradley C. Edwards, ed. Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee (Literary Conversations Series). University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1604732269. Angel ELam's interview with Bharati Mukherjee, first published in New Letters vol. 71, no.4 (summer 2005.) Search this book on
  14. ↑ Ashley Renders (February 12, 2018). "Toronto police are in court following largest arrests in Canadian history". Vice Media. An investigation into carding by the Toronto Star in 2012 showed that police disproportionately targeted young black and brown Canadians between 2008 and 2013.
  15. ↑ Charmaine Nelson (February 20, 2020). "Modern Racism In Canada Has Deep Colonial Roots". The Huffington Post. Moving forward the "we" of Canada must be expanded to include the reality and experiences of black, Indigenous, and brown Canadians who understand contemporary racism to be a legacy of colonialism and slavery.
  16. ↑ Naben Ruthnum (September 1, 2017). "Why Curry Doesn't Really Exist". Vice Media. There's an expectation for brown people in Canada, the US, or the UK to tell a certain story over and over. It's the story of longing and the homeland, being a first-generation immigrant
  17. ↑ "Quality Content Episode 12: The Secret Life of Canada". Canada 2020. November 26, 2018. “We really wanted to tell the stories of Indigenous people, women, and black and brown Canadians that had contributed so much to our history but we certainly didn’t learn about ourselves in school.”
  18. ↑ Wendy Naava Smolash (2011), Citizenship, race, and nationalism in contemporary English-Canadian newspaper representations of Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians, Simon Fraser University, Through this racialized binary, Canadians with brown skin and the wrong kind of name, clothing, or religion become the targets of racialized discourse
  19. ↑ Chandrima Chakraborty (2012), India via Trinidad and Canada: Negotiating Hospitality in Shani Mootoo's Short Stories (Volume 37 ed.), Studies in Canadian Literature, pp. 66–81, Both stories demonstrate the narrators' gradual realization that they have to continually negotiate their relations with white and brown Canadians and other diasporic Indians.
  20. ↑ Sumartojo, Widyarini. "My kind of Brown": Indo-Canadian youth identity and belonging in Greater Vancouver (PhD thesis) ( Archived 2014-10-19 at the Wayback Machine). Simon Fraser University, 2012. p. 8 (PDF document 18/182). See profile at Simon Fraser University.
  21. ↑ Ayla Raza (2014), "A Brown Identity: Multi-Layered, Fluid, And Ambiguous", "Negotiating “Brown”: Youth Identity Formations in The Greater Toronto Area, University of Toronto, p. 48, At the moment, there is minimal inclusion of “Brown” history in the curriculum; the history of “Brown” people in Canada, their experiences, accounts, contributions, and so forth are neither acknowledged nor represented in school.


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