The Problem With Calling All Latines Brown

While discussing TV shows with her eye doctor, Stephanie Cortez recommended the latest season of With Love, a moving show about a Mexican-American family with various subplots and love triangles; upon which, the doctor, a fellow Latina, asked Cortez if she was Mexican. “No, I’m Puerto Rican,” Cortez recalled replying. According to Cortez, the doctor responded, “Ah, I knew you were a fellow Brown girl.”

The comment struck Cortez, mostly because she had never identified as Brown herself and had never been referred to as such. In fact, a few months earlier while attending a professional event for Latinas in the marketing industry, she had been asked by a fellow attendee whether she “identified as white-passing.”

“I’m proud to be Latina, but as I grew up, I learned that being Latina and being white are not mutually exclusive,” Cortez tells Refinery29 Somos. “And although I never called myself Brown, I did at one point refer to myself as a person of color because I thought the term encompassed all Latinos, regardless of race, which I see now was very problematic.”

“I’m proud to be Latina, but as I grew up, I learned that being Latina and being white are not mutually exclusive.”

Depending on who you ask, hearing the term Hispanic is the equivalent of listening to nails scraping a chalkboard. Ditto for the term Latinx, a gender-neutral term used to refer to people of Latin American descent whose use has been unpacked and repacked and thrown all over the floor in a frenzy. And while it’s become best practice to allow Latines to self-identify — whether this be with a pan-ethnic term or by country of origin — having terms that seek to capture the more than 62 million Latines living in the United States can be useful, experts say.

However, those same experts argue that using generalized terms, particularly Brown, as a catchall phrase to group together all Latines can also be incredibly limiting. According to Latine scholars, using Brown to describe all Latines is inaccurate as it mistakenly categorizes white Latines as people of color and has the potential to erase Black Latines, a historically marginalized group within a historically marginalized group.

Should the term Brown in reference to Latines be completely shelved then given these sizeable issues? As with most labels, “context matters,” Tanya K. Hernández, author of Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and The Struggle for Equality and a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, tells Somos.

“Using Brown to describe all Latines is inaccurate as it mistakenly categorizes white Latines as people of color and has the potential to erase Black Latines, a historically marginalized group within a historically marginalized group.”

While there are aspects to the label that are problematic, the term Brown to reference Latines is complicated and can have utility, she and other experts say.

The History of the Term Brown in Reference to Latines

“Racial categorizations are always changing,” Paul Ortiz, author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States and a history professor at University of Florida, says. “That’s what makes them so challenging. Twenty years from now, people will be surprised by the terms we use today because they’ll be using something different.”

According to Ortiz, the term Brown is used widely today in reference to people of many different cultures. However, through his research, he ties the term back to apartheid law in South Africa, where it was used to refer to “all people who have a darker skin pigment that’s not Black” and to colonialism in regions like India, South Africa, and Mexico. He has also come across Brown in eugenics journals leading up to World War II.

“Racial categorizations are always changing.”

Speaking from personal experience as a Mexican American growing up in the 1960s, Ortiz says he was “old enough to remember the Chicano movement” repurposing Brown, which had once been a term of derision akin to calling someone a “lowlife,” to a term of pride.

“It was the class term as well,” Ortiz says. “Being Brown-skinned meant that you worked hard. You worked for white people. You did manual labor. … When Mexican Americans claimed terms like Chicano, Brown Pride, and Bronze Pride, they took a longstanding stereotype of them being considered less intelligent and turned it upside down.”

Today, the term Brown in reference to Latines is used in both activism and academic contexts.

“Generally, I see the term Brown becoming more and more popular to stand in for people of color to affirm the non-white racial status of a Latino community,” Zaire Dinzey-Flores, a sociology and Latino and Caribbean Studies professor at Rutgers University, tells Somos. “It’s also used for other communities that are generally thought of as racially mixed, like the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa.”

The Dangers of Using Brown as a Catchall Term

As protests for racial justice unfolded across the United States after George Floyd’s murder, groups of Latine demonstrators garnered attention for their protest signs that read, “Brown Lives for Black Lives” and “Latinos for Black Lives Matter.”

While the signs were meant to indicate support for the fight for racial justice and show that human rights struggles are intertwined across race, some noted that the protestors’ messaging fell short as it failed to acknowledge that Latinos can be Black.

“I saw lots of ‘Brown Lives for Black Lives’ banners and people marching saying ‘We’re Brown, and marching in support of BLM,’ which is a beautiful allyship,” Hernández says. “But Latinos are not just one appearance as lumping us all together as Brown suggests. We are not just in allyship of Black Lives Matter; we are part of Black Lives Matter.”

“Latinos are not just one appearance as lumping us all together as Brown suggests.”

“And in this instance, with the signs, support of BLM erased the Afro-Latino subject and put Blackness as something apart from our own community,” she adds.

This erasure, combined with the increased colorism and racism Black Latines content with, may be why some choose not to identify as Afro-Latine and why some “young Afro-Latine activists talk about how they want to get rid of Latinidad, saying that it needs to be abolished, and that they do not believe in it anymore as a panethnic umbrella,” Hernández says.

The possible repercussions of using Brown as a catchall phrase are also being discussed in the context of the ongoing debate regarding how Latines are counted on the Census, which measures allots demographic data, including race, and is used to determine allotment of resources to communities across the country. According to 2020 Census data, nearly 60% of Latines reported belonging to one racial group, while more than a third chose “Some Other Race” alone on the demographic survey.

“When you translate Latinidad into a racial category as the Census is proposing to do, you average out the experience of the lightest and the darkest versus being able to look at at different racial categories within Latino communities and how they relate to economic outcome.”

“When you translate Latinidad into a racial category as the Census is proposing to do, you average out the experience of the lightest and the darkest versus being able to look at at different racial categories within Latino communities and how they relate to economic outcome,” Dinzey-Flores says. “We know income darker-skinned Latinos tend to fare worse relative to lighter-skinned Latinos, but [if we combine them all together under one term], Black Latinos are going to look like they’re doing better than they really are, underestimating the impact of race on Black Latine socioeconomic outcome.”

Brown as a Term of Solidarity

While scholars acknowledge that the term Brown can be used to deflect any conversation within Latine communities about racial hierarchy, they also state that the term has utility and can be used to foster solidarity.

“Sometimes, it’s not the particular word put in place but how we use these words,” Hernández says. “When Brown is being used to avoid accountability and difficult conversations, it harms many of us. If it’s being used to highlight a problem we as a population need to support one another in addressing, it would be useful to specify context and intent.”

“When Brown is being used to avoid accountability and difficult conversations, it harms many of us. If it’s being used to highlight a problem we as a population need to support one another in addressing, it would be useful to specify context and intent.”

Just as using Brown as a catchall term for Latines is limited, so is considering the complete obliteration of the term as a successful intervention, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, says.

“What does Brown mean? If we want it to mean something, we have to resignify it and make it mean something specific to that movement,” Mirabal adds. “It means something within context, but without context it doesn’t really mean much.”