{"id":22577,"date":"2019-01-03T12:44:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-03T17:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=22577"},"modified":"2019-01-03T12:44:00","modified_gmt":"2019-01-03T17:44:00","slug":"the-genies-out-of-the-bottle-journalist-author-talks-what-it-means-to-be-brown-in-canada-and-impact-of-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/the-genies-out-of-the-bottle-journalist-author-talks-what-it-means-to-be-brown-in-canada-and-impact-of-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"The Genie\u2019s Out of the Bottle: Journalist, author talks what it means to be \u201cBrown\u201d in Canada and impact of social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

The worst thing you can do is check your Twitter feed before turning off the lights at night, according to award-winning journalist Kamal Al-Solaylee.
\nAl-Solaylee, the author of Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (To Everyone), brought his unique perspective on this issue to the Aurora Public Library this fall as part of Lit On Tour 2018, a program of the International Festival of Authors.
\nHosted by this writer, Al-Solaylee shared with a packed audience in the APL\u2019s Magna Room, what inspired him to begin an in-depth look on what it means to be \u201cBrown\u201d in Canada, admittedly a task undertaken in 2015, well before the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and many right wing movements around the world \u2013 and here at home.
\n\u201cThere is a whole association with the term \u2018Brown,\u2019 particularly in South Asia and also with people from the Middle East and, to some extent, Latino people,\u201d he explained. \u201cI\u2019ve always wanted to know where the term comes from and what it means in our world today. Much to my surprise, I couldn\u2019t find any books about that to get me going. I decided I was going to write a book about being Brown just to start a conversation on what it means to be brown-skinned in the world.\u201d
\nBrown, he said, is a \u201cbuffer zone between black and white in racialist science\u201d and around the world it can be seen as a \u201cmiddle ground\u201d that is not clearly understood.
\n\u201cIt is premised on the fear of blackness and as an aspiration towards whiteness,\u201d he said. \u201cThe second premise of the book is that Brown has become the colour of cheap labor, the idea of importing people to do the work that people in the community, once a certain country reaches a middle class level, or has enough to farm out work, they go towards countries that are poorer, but also people who are darker-skinned, who do the work; the labour-intensive work, whether that be child care, working in farms, in fields, work that is labour intensive and not particularly well-paid.
\n\u201cI wanted to talk about the colourization of Islam as a \u2018Brown Menace\u2019 taking off from every generation, or every few decades you have a group of people that have been designated as a \u2018menace\u2019. Before that, it was the \u2018yellow peril\u2019 to refer to Japanese and Chinese people, and I do think at the moment we\u2019re living in a moment of what I would call \u2018Brown Menace\u2019 and that is largely to do with particularly Muslim populations in places like France, the UK, Canada, and, with that, a certain idea of values that don\u2019t belong in a Western, Judeo-Christian tradition.\u201d
\nAl-Solaylee ends his literary look at what it means to be Brown around the world on what he views as a bright note. He describes, for instance, the 2015 Federal Election as one that was peppered with divisive rhetoric and, ultimately, rhetoric that voters rejected. He said this left him feeling \u201cPollyannaish\u201d about the world around him. But, since 2015, the world has seen the rise of highly divisive, and often hate-filled politics.
\nThat Pollyannaish feeling has quickly evaporated.
\n\u201cWho would have thought that in 2015 we would be talking about the return of Fascism or the return of White Nationalism White Ethno-State, or we would be talking about a Muslim ban or separating Mexican children from their parents in detention camps?\u201d he asked the audience. \u201cWho would have thought we\u2019d be talking about Brexit, the demonization of immigrants, about a President of the United States describing Mexicans as \u2018rapists\u2019, his entourage using words like \u2018vermin\u2019 and \u2018cockroaches\u2019 to describe refugees? I think the world has turned on its head since the book came out.
\n\u201cI captured the beginning of this. I sensed it was happening and that\u2019s why I wrote the book, but I never in a million years, in 2015, thought we would reach where we are right now so fast. I thought it was something that was going to take another generation, but we reached it in three years. I am very depressed and pessimistic about the state of liberal democracies in general. I think they are under threat, failing and not fighting back because everyone is fighting too dirty. I don\u2019t know where this is going to lead. What world are we living in? How did it happen so fast?\u201d
\nThe assembled audience had a few ideas, ranging from the rise of social media, to the role of traditional media.
\nOne woman, who said she came to Canada from the United Kingdom, said she came from a multicultural city and didn\u2019t have the same experiences as Al-Solaylee had in his formative years, but more recently she has seen an \u201cuncomfortable\u201d degree of hatred rising in her home city, thanks in no small part, she said, to the media.
\nWhile Al-Solaylee cited the predominant tabloid culture in the United Kingdom, and likened publications like The Daily Mail and The Sun in the UK to Fox News in the United States, he said one commonality was media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
\n\u201cThere is one man who is actually wreaking havoc with the political systems in the U.K. and the European mainland particularly with Brexit. On Fox News, here in Canada,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to admit also the rise of digital media, we\u2019ll take our fair share of blame as journalists and anyone can weaponize their Twitter accounts and turn it into a platform of hate and violence. If you\u2019re a woman on Twitter, I am sure you know what that feels like, and if you\u2019re a person of colour as well. As much as I like the idea of the democratization of media and everyone can publish what you like, and if you have a following you\u2019re a journalist, I do think this editorless work is a big concern in this world. You go to the comments section and you wonder just how frightening is the fact that some of these people might be our friends and neighbours and they are hiding behind the anonymity of social media.\u201d
\nThe idea of the \u201cweaponization\u201d of social media struck a chord with another woman in the audience, who questioned whether there was any way to turn the tide and use social media as a way to \u201cbuild bridges and increase people\u2019s connectedness with each other.\u201d
\nBut the author said he felt the Genie was out of the bottle.
\n\u201cIt is an uncontrollable platform. Studies show that when journalists step in, say they post something about their story, all the trolls come out of the woodwork and journalists come out and re-set the agenda and the conversation that follows is much more civilized and much more on-topic,\u201d he said, noting he asks his students at Ryerson University to take regular social media breaks. \u201cGood people should step in and start to redirect the conversation, but it is virtually impossible. We\u2019re dealing with things like bots and artificial intelligence that is just a whole new world and I honestly don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The worst thing you can do is check your Twitter feed before turning off the lights at night, according to award-winning journalist Kamal Al-Solaylee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5S9","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-17 23:16:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}