The Construction of Brownness: Latino/a and South Asian Bloggers' Responses to SB 1070

Abstract

The vernacular discourses of Latino/a and South Asian American bloggers in the context of SB 1070, legislation recently passed in Arizona, illustrate how their shared experiences of discrimination (re-)articulate “brownness” as a complex racial formation aligned with constructions of “illegal” immigrants. Bloggers' differentiation of their subjective experiences of alien citizenship and racialized belonging from white or black citizenship problematizes the rigidity of their “middling” positionality within the U.S. racial structure, encouraging a more contextualized approach. I consider the bloggers' varied constructions of brownness, its distinctive positionality within racial structures, and their contestations of the discourses that racialize brown identities.

Keywords:

• Brownness
• Immigration
• Black/White
• SB 1070
• Racial Formation

I would like to thank Dreama G. Moon, Michelle A. Holling, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on previous drafts. I would also like to thank Mary Jane Collier for her support.

I would like to thank Dreama G. Moon, Michelle A. Holling, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on previous drafts. I would also like to thank Mary Jane Collier for her support.

Notes

[1] This blog site was ended as of May 2012.

[2] The discursive norms of weblogs minimize the importance of proofreading for grammatical precision, including capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Therefore, I did not change the texts to suit scholarly norms of grammar, nor have I identified any such instances using the indicator “[sic].” All direct quotes have been directly cut and pasted from the blog texts in order to preserve their integrity.