In high school, my high school at least, a ‘brown person’ was anyone who was Indian, Arabic, Pakistani, Guyanese, etc, but you didn’t know for sure. Or care, really. You just didn’t want to be like ‘those Indian kids.’ So you said ‘those brown kids.’
I always hated this. Not on some ‘that’s offensive!’ grounds, I just thought it sounded ludicrously stupid. But really, what else can you say if referring to an ambiguous… Brown person? As crude as it sounds, you can’t say it’s more offensive than just calling people Arabs or whatever. What’s the alternative? ‘Those kids who look like they have ancestry hailing from the Indian subcontinent, possibly’? That just doesn’t work. Is there really a better term than ‘brown’? Does not seem entirely likely.
And don’t give me some bosh about ‘why do we have to refer to them as anything?!’ because we both know that’s inane and unreasonable.
