Brown Complicity

Social Justice Usage

Source: Dewan, Angela. “Indians are being held up as a model minority. That’s not helping the Black Lives Matter movement.” CNN. June 29, 2020.

[D]uring a panel discussion in Toronto earlier this month on “Brown complicity in White supremacy,” Canadians of South Asian origins came together to talk about issues such as brown silence, brown fragility and the continuation of the model minority myth.

Herveen Singh, an education administration expert from Canada now working at the Zayed University in Dubai, said: “Essentially, the model minority myth was created to take attention away from the enslavement of Black people and replace it with ‘you’re just not working hard enough,’ not taking into account the hundreds of years of slavery, the eugenics project, that firmly puts White people at the top of the hierarchy and gives them license to dehumanize Black people, who are firmly at the bottom of this racial hierarchy,” she said, adding that brown people were usually placed “somewhere in the middle.”

“When Black communities are under siege, where are we? Where is collective brown solidarity for Black lives? Till now, the silence has been absolutely deafening.”

New Discourses Commentary

In the Theory of Critical Social Justice, racism is believed to be systemic and learned through socialization, which means it is picked up from society both automatically and by its being taught. In that regard, it is considered the ordinary state of affairs in society, this being the first core assumption of critical race Theory, and everyone in society is believed to be influenced by a fundamentally racist and white supremacist social system that is, most especially, intrinsically anti-Black. Not being explicitly against the system and the systemic racism that is believed to characterize it is considered a form of complicity in the racist system (see also, anti-racism, disrupt, and dismantle), which for white people is sometimes specifically referred to as “white complicity.” For people of color who are not black (and, by definition, not white), often referred to as “brown,” this same notion of complicity also applies under the heading “brown complicity,” specifically meaning brown complicity in anti-Black systemic racism and, by extension, white supremacy.

This may seem confusing, but the underlying Theory is simple. Within Critical Social Justice thought, the fundamental nature of (social) reality is wholly determined by the forces and dynamics of systemic power. Each person (and idea and everything else) is best understood within Theory in terms of its relationship to these intersecting systems of power, which is referred to as one’s positionality. Being a member of an identity group that is Theoretically located anywhere above the bottom of the systemic oppression hierarchy (see also, BIPOC and subaltern) confers some measure of privilege, which is Theorized to be “relational” and dependent upon one’s positionality. While white privilege, which goes with being acknowledged by society as white (which is automatic when one has white skin or is ethnically white—see also, white-skin privilege) is most well-known among the racial privileges, brown people are considered to have brown privilege despite belonging to a Theoretically racially minoritized group because they aren’t black people.

Like white privilege is Theorized to do for white people, brown privilege affords brown people the luxury of being able to be anti-Black while remaining in denial of being anti-Black (see also, active ignorance, pernicious ignorance, white ignorance, and willful ignorance). By virtue of this self-compounding privilege and a willingness to enjoy the benefits of it, brown people are Theorized to be complicit in anti-Blackness, which in some way makes them complicit in the prevailing system of white supremacy even at the same time as they are allegedly victims of it. This status—brown complicity—is especially present when the brown people involved are considered white-adjacent or model minorities, both designating categories of brown people who embrace some or all of the operative values critical race Theory identifies with “white culture.” Avoiding brown complicity would require critically engaging brown positionality and thereby adopting a critical consciousness about race, thus about being brown and about how being brown carries with it brown privilege and anti-Blackness, which necessitates taking on anti-racism under the direction of critical race Theory in solidarity with black people.

Perhaps most confusing about the idea of brown complicity is that it is brown complicity both in anti-Blackness and, often, in white supremacy, not some primordial and intrinsically oppressive brownness. This is because anti-Blackness is believed to be an intrinsic property of whiteness and thus something that brown people are doing in support of whiteness at the expense of Blackness. These are maintained to be in a zero-sum, Manichean opposition thanks to the Marxian conflict theory at the heart of critical race Theory, which is to say that critical race Theory cannot think about the issue in any more sophisticated way than this. In some sense, this can make brown complicity even worse than white complicity from a Theoretical ethical consideration because it implies something like treason against racial solidarity—all victims of white supremacy should know they’re victims of white supremacy and should act accordingly.

In practice, it is quite obvious that brown complicity, like white complicity, is an attempt by critical race Theorists to assign moral responsibility to everyone who isn’t black for maintaining a system of anti-Black racism that critical race Theory alleges to exist and focuses on to the exclusion of most other ideas. It is equally obvious that the assignment of this group-based moral responsibility (read: guilt) is meant to induce activism through allyship and solidarity, which is to say compliance and complicity with critical race Theory and its activists, by manipulating brown people into believing they are willful or inadvertent participants in anti-Black racism. It, like the notion of complicity (and white complicity) under the analysis of the Theory of Critical Social Justice, is therefore best understood as a manipulative extension of an important ethical concept into an illegitimate domain because it happens to be productive to the Woke style of activism.

Of note, this term, along with brown privilege, brown fragility, and other similar terms, sprang suddenly into existence in the summer of 2020 in the rush of critical race Theory activism that erupted in the wake of Black Lives Matter protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

See also, complicity, white complicity, brown privilege, brown silence, and brown fragility.

Related Terms

Active ignorance; Ally/Allyship; Anti-Blackness; Anti-racism; BIPOC; Blackness; Brown fragility; Brown privilege; Brown silence; Complicity; Conflict theory; Critical; Critical consciousness; Critical race Theory; Denial; Dismantle; Disrupt; Engagement; Identity; Intersectionality; Marxian; Minoritize; Model minority; Oppression; People of color; Pernicious ignorance; Positionality; Power (systemic); Privilege; Race; Racism (systemic); Reality; Social Justice; Socialization; Solidarity; Subaltern; System, the; Theory; Victim; White; White-adjacent; White complicity; White ignorance; White-skin privilege; White supremacy; Whiteness; Willful ignorance; Woke/Wokeness

Revision date: 11/16/20

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