Brown (racial classification)

Brown is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a light to moderate brown complexion. Historical race conceptsScientific racism and Color terminology for race In the 18th and 19th century, European and American writers proposed geographically based "scientific" differences among "the races". Many of these racial models assigned colors to the groups described, and some included a "brown race" as in the following: In the late 18th century, German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach extended Linnaeus's four-color race model by adding the brown race, "Malay race", which included both the Malay division of Austronesian (Southern-Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Pattani, Sumatra, Madagascar, Formosans, etc.) and Polynesians and Melanesians of Pacific Islands, as well as Papuans and Aborigines of Australia. In 1775, "John Hunter of Edinburg included under the label light brown, Southern Europeans, Italians, the Spanish, Persians, Turks and Laplanders, under the label brown." Jean Baptiste Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy's five-race scheme differed from Blumenbach's by including 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. In 1915, Donald Mackenzie conceived a "Mediterranean or Brown race, the eastern branch of which reaches to India and the western to the British Isles... [and includes] predynastic Egyptians... [and some populations of] Neolithic man". Eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard in his The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) mapped a "brown race" as native to North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Caucasus, the Near East, Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Austronesia (Malay race). Stoddard's "brown" is one of five "primary races", contrasting with "white", "black", "yellow" and "Amerindian".