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Like black people and white people, the concept of brown people is a political, racial, ethnic, societal, or cultural classification. No people are really brown in colour. and according to some they arent while according to others they arent (For further discussion, see human skin colour.)

Historically, the appellation "brown people" has been applied by various people to a wide range of disparate, and disconnected, groups of people.

Historical concepts

Anthropologists during The Enlightenment defined five human races: Yellows (East Asians), Reds (Native Americans), Whites (Europeans), Browns (Australoids, Indians, Southeast Asians), and Blacks (Africans). Carolus Linnaeus original model had just four races, white, yellow, red, and black. His protege, anthropology founder Johann Blumenbach, completed his mentor's colour-coded race model by adding the brown race, "Malay", for Polynesisians and Melanesians of Pacific Islands, and for aborigines of Australia. Some anthropologists added the brown race back in as an Australoid category (which includes aboriginal peoples of Australia along with various peoples of southeast and south Asia, especially Melanesia and the Malay Archipelago), and viewed it as separate from Negroids (often lumping Australoids in with Caucasoids). Jean Baptiste Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy included Ethiopians in the brown race, as well as Oceanic peoples. Louis Figuier adopted and adapted d'Omalius d'Halloy's classification and also included Egyptians in the brown race.

By the 19th century, the notion of a single "brown people" was being overthrown. Cust mentions Grammar in 1852 denying that there was one single "brown race", but in fact several races speaking distinct languages. The 1858 Cyclopaedia of India and of eastern and southern Asia notes that Keane was dividing the "brown people" into quaternion: a western branch that he termed the Malay, a north-western group that he termed the Micronesian, and the peoples of the eastern archipelagoes that he termed the Maori and the Polynesian. Anthropologists and scholars were at the least dividing the people of the Pacific into the "dark people" and the "brown people". The "dark people" were the inhabitants of the Western Pacific as far as Fiji. The "brown people" were the people inhabiting the islands to the east of Fiji, as far as Easter Island.

By the 20th century, at least as far as ethnography was concerned, the concept of a "brown people" as part of a five colour system of racial classification had been largely supplanted by far more complex systems. In 1900, Joseph Deniker published a racial classfication system that comprised six grand divisions, seventeen divisions, and twenty-nine races.

20th and 21st century concepts

The appellation "brown people" has been applied in the 20th and 21st centuries to several groups.

Coloureds in South Africa

In 1950s (and later) South Africa the "brown people" were the Coloureds, who were largely, and erroneously, believed to have been the production of black-white sexual union out of wedlock. The Afrikaans terms, which incorporate many subtleties of heritage, political agenda, and identity, are "bryn" ("brown") ,"brynes" ("browns"), and "brynmense" ("brown people"). Some South Africans prefer the appellation "brynmense" to "Coloured".

Mexican Americans and Mestizo

In the United States Mexican Americans are referred to by some as "brown people". There is a strong division over this, however. At opposite ends of the spectrum are those that take pride in calling themselves "brown", and those who assert that there is no such scientific classification and totally reject the idea. In the middle are those that assert that the combination of indigenous Indian and Spanish heritage has led to a group of people who are, informally, "brown".

References

1. J. David Colfax and Susan Frankel Sternberg (Spring 1972). "The Perpetuation of Racial Stereotypes: Blacks in Mass Circulation Magazine Advertisements". The Public Opinion Quarterly. 36 (1): 8–18. White people aren't white. Black people aren't black. Yellow people aren't yellow. Brown people aren't brown. {{cite journal}}: line feed character in |quotation= at position 28 (help)
2. Ras Michael, Rastafari
3. ^ Stephen Jay Gould (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 402. ISBN 0-393-31425-1.
4. Jane Desmond (2001). Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. University of Chicago Press. p. 54. ISBN 0226143767.
5. ^ John G. Jackson (1938). Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization: A Critical Review of the Evidence of Archaeology,... New York, N.Y.: The Blyden Society.
6. Houghton Mifflin. "Definition of Australoid". Yahoo Education.
7. Bert Thompson (August 1990). "The Origin of Races". Reason & Revelation. 10 (8). Apologetics Press: 33–36.
8. Joseph-Anténor Firmin and Antenor Firmin (2002). The Equality of the Human Races. Asselin Charles (translator) and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (contributor). University of Illinois Press. p. 17. ISBN 0252071026.
9. Robert Needham Cust (1878). A Sketch of the Modern Languages of the East Indies. Trübner & co. p. 13.
10. Edward Balfour (1976). The Encyclopaedia Asiatica, Comprising Indian Subcontinent, Eastern and Southern Asia. Cosmo Publications. p. 315.
11. William Wyatt Gill (1892). The South Pacific and New Guinea Past and Present with Notes on the Hervey Group. Charles Potter. p. 6.
12. Mohamed Adhikari (2005). Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Ohio University Press. p. 26. ISBN 0896802442.
13. Gerald L. Stone (2002). "The lexicon and sociolinguistic codes of the working-class Afrikaans-speaking Cape Peninsula coloured community". In Rajend Mesthrie (ed.). Language in South Africa. Cambridge University Press. p. 394. ISBN 052153383X.
14. Raoul Lowery Contreras (2003). Jalapeno Chiles, Mexican Americans and Other Hot Stuff: A Peoples' Cultural Identity. iUniverse. p. 39. ISBN 0595292569.

Further reading

• Alexander Winchell (1890). "XX. Genealogy of the Brown Races". Preadamites: Or, A Demonstration of the Existence of Men Before Adam. S. C. Griggs and company. pp. xvii et seq.

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