Brown Intimacy Pt. 1: The Self

Yesterday I found myself thinking about the moment I realized I was brown. The moment that established a disjoint between the person who didn’t know the meaning of color, and the person who could no longer see anything outside of it. I always knew of course, that my ethnic roots sprouted from a region where people emerged in the shade of the earth from which they grew. I knew what we looked like, with our dark hair and sharp features, and eyes with an intensity hidden between layers of bronze. I had grown up close to my own kind and had maintained a social bubble of uniformity within my community. But as a child, I was never cognizant of the difference between my community and my lighter-skinned peers. It wasn’t until my teenage years when a friend from Belgium placed her arm next to mine. I looked down at our arms resting comfortably next to each other and saw a shocking contrast. I remember thinking: what the fuck, was I always this brown? 

I didn’t understand my alarm at the time. I knew what I looked like – I was aware of the tone that enrobed and enveloped my body since birth. I had seen brown children stand next to their white peers, I had intersected and interacted with white skin for most of my life. So why did this physical attribute never fully resonate till that very moment? How had I only recently discovered the extent of my brown body?

It was after that moment when I became hyper aware of what my skin looked like – how it darkened so easily in the sun and how it glowed under the light. How my lips looked a little more purple than pink to match my coloring, how I could never unearth a concealer for undertones that were warm with the sun and cool with the coming of winter. And I began to set myself next to others to see what I could find – which people I could stand next to and look like a bold stroke on a plain canvas, and which I could merge with as if we were born from the same patch of earth. I was doing something that I had never done in childhood – I was defining my color in comparison to others. Features that had previously been stark and separate in their isolation now lay bare, exposed in their side-by-side representations. I had never looked at myself through the skin of another and as I aged, I inadvertently formed a habit. 

So much of my current identity is defined by contrasting myself to whiteness. So much of my foundations are built on the “otherness” of my identity. I see myself, define myself, describe myself, through the distances between brown and white and as I do this, I embed myself further into the whiteness that I aspire to escape from. I embed myself within systems built around the comparison, separation, and marginalization of color. And it makes me wonder – how much of me has formed only in an effort to distance myself from my colonizer? What will be left of me when I remove myself from under the white lens? 

Colonized mentalities run through our veins in inconspicuous ways, forming distinctions and building social structures that cannot be foundationally strong when divided so intricately. I’ve come to realize that it is important to recognize color, to understand how color interacts with its surroundings. But it is equally as important to establish an identity devoid of color, to recognize qualities in the self that bring beauty and value outside of a colored experience. I see these identities in those I love, flowing through them and out of them and binding them to others in ways more intimate than just a comparison of skin. I know someone who speaks wisdom with such ease that I imagine he doesn’t even realize the weight of depth that flows through him. I know someone whose eyes brighten whenever she opens them to the world, someone who feels the pain of her loved ones as if it is her own, who weeps with the world’s suffering and rejoices with the light. I know someone whose curiosity spans continents, whose desire to learn the complexities and intricacies of people can bring past and present generations together. I know someone whose very presence in a room can extract the best of the people that surround them. And as I discover more of these attributes in those around me, I look forward to getting to know myself just as distinctly, just as intimately.