{"id":30709,"date":"2013-04-28T23:15:18","date_gmt":"2013-04-28T23:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30709"},"modified":"2013-04-28T23:15:18","modified_gmt":"2013-04-28T23:15:18","slug":"on-being-brown-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30709","title":{"rendered":"On Being Brown in America"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Being Brown in America<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2013-04-25<\/p>\n

Amitava Kumar<\/a><\/strong>, Writer and Professor of English
\nVassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

The recent bombings in Boston<\/a> threw up many questions. One of the most pressing, in my somewhat narrow view, is the meaning of being brown in America.<\/p>\n

On April 17, two days after the bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring almost 200 others, CNN\u2019s<\/a> John King<\/a> went on air to say that the suspect was a \u201cdark-skinned male.\u201d In the CNN video, which shows that the time of the broadcast was 1.15 p.m. on Wednesday, we see King pointing to a photograph from the front-page of The New York Times<\/em>. A positive identification had been made based on a surveillance video from a Lord & Taylor store just outside the frame of the picture in the Times<\/em>, King said. A little later that afternoon, King would go on to assure viewers that a subsequent arrest had been made.<\/p>\n

No one had been arrested that day, of course, and, alas, there was no dark-skinned male. What is remarkable is that even while first reporting his piece of \u201cexclusive\u201d news, CNN\u2019s King felt it necessary to qualify what he was saying. The qualifications he offered were not about the haste with which he was sharing a piece of misinformation, or the bewildering lack of specificity in his description, or even the absence of adequate verification. Instead, his remarks appeared to suggest to his viewers that he couldn\u2019t be more open with them because of politically correct sentiments that complicated open disclosures of \u201cgame changers\u201d that the police had uncovered:<\/p>\n

\u201cI was told they have a breakthrough in the identification of the suspect, and I\u2019m told \u2014 and I want to be very careful about this because people get very sensitive when you say these things \u2014 I was told by one of these sources who\u2019s a law enforcement official that this was a dark-skinned male\u2026 The official used some other words. I\u2019m not going to repeat them until we get more information because of the sensitivities. There are some people who will take offense even in saying that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some people!<\/em> Who are they?…<\/p>\n

…You\u2019ve heard the words of the old blues song: \u201cThey say if you\u2019s white, should be all right, \/ If you\u2019s brown, stick around, \/ But if you\u2019s black, mmm mmm, brother, get back, get back, get back.\u201d That old racial imaginary is changing. Brown is staining the edges of the racial divide. Richard Rodriguez<\/a> has written, \u201cBrown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable \u2014 the line separating black from white, for example.\u201d If we are going to be optimistic, we can even say that brown is the color of the future.<\/p>\n

A new book<\/a> by a Boston-based academic and filmmaker, Vivek Bald<\/a>, describes the formation of what he calls Bengali Harlem<\/a> in the early decades of the last century. Starting with the migration of Bengali peddlers to the United States in 1880s, and a later group of seamen, mostly Muslims, in the 1930s and 1940s, those who came to this country didn\u2019t establish separate ethnic enclaves like later immigrants. Instead, they formed \u201cnetworks that were embedded in working-class Creole, African-American, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods and entwined with the lives of their residents.\u201d This radical mixing and assimilation, Bald argues, is an unnoticed aspect of the history of U.S. immigration.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The invisible assimilation of working-class immigrants in that early phase has given way to an entirely different order of mixing in contemporary America. The attacks of Sept. 11<\/a> might have drawn a line in the sand, but the reality of sand is that it keeps shifting…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Being Brown in America The New York Times 2013-04-25 Amitava Kumar, Writer and Professor of English Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York The recent bombings in Boston threw up many questions. One of the most pressing, in my somewhat narrow view, is the meaning of being brown in America. On April 17, two days after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,394,20],"tags":[14561,2640,2327,12149],"class_list":["post-30709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-amitava-kumar","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-vivek-bald"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}