I recently had a discussion with a columnist on Asian American issues about my own identity as a brown person who self-identifies as a conservative. It’s rather amusing to me that the mainstream media is far more curious about my rare intersection of identities (e.g., interest in my combination of atheism and right-wing orientation), than the preponderance of my online production in science, which is perhaps a touch too abstruse for the general public.
But much of the back & forth hinged upon definitions. For example, I use the term “brown” regularly. But what does that mean? First, a word is a word, and anyone can “own” a word. I’m not the pope of terms like “brown” or “desi,” their meaning crystallizes through bottom up consensus. But my own definition makes recourse to the set theory concept of a union. That is, for me the identity is not a intersection of necessary preconditions, but a wide collection of identities which can be usefully bracketed together. So when asked why I considered myself brown, the reality that I’m racially a brown person, and will be until the day that I die. I could relocate to Japan, marry a Japanese woman and change my name, and become initiated into Shinto rites, but I’d still be brown in terms of my racial identity. For me the brown-as-race definition works well enough that I don’t need to think about it too deeply. But there other flavors out there. Continue reading
