Brown
What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone)
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Narrated by:
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Fajer Al-Kaisi
About this listen
Winner of the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Trillium Book Award
A Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Life, Walrus, CBC Books, Chatelaine, Hill Times, 49th Shelf, and Writers' Trust Best Book of the Year
With the urgency and passion of Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), the seductive storytelling of JD Vance (Hillbilly Elegy) and the historical rigor of Carol Anderson (White Rage), Kamal Al-Solaylee explores the in-between space that brown people occupy in today's world: on the cusp of whiteness and the edge of blackness. Brown proposes a cohesive racial identity and politics for the millions of people from the Global South and provides a timely context for the frictions and anxieties around immigration and multiculturalism that have led to the rise of populist movements in Europe and the election of Donald Trump.
At once personal and global, Brown is packed with storytelling and on-the-street reporting conducted over two years in 10 countries on four continents that reveals a multitude of lives and stories from destinations as far apart as the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, the United States, Britain, Trinidad, France, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Qatar, and Canada. It features striking research about the emergence of brown as the color of cheap labor and the pursuit of a lighter skin tone as a global status symbol. As he studies the significance of brown skin for people from North Africa and the Middle East, Mexico and Central America, and South and East Asia, Al-Solaylee also reflects on his own identity and experiences as a brown-skinned person (in his case from Yemen) who grew up with images of whiteness as the only indicators of beauty and success.
This is a daring and politically resonant work that challenges our assumptions about race, immigration, and globalism and recounts the heartbreaking stories of the people caught in the middle.
©2016 Kamal Al-Solaylee (P)2017 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than 10 years, and he has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely audiobook, he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success, and, most intriguing of all, what they think of one another.
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Obsessed with bad politics
- By Erik on 09-07-20
By: Michael Booth
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Putin Country
- A Journey into the Real Russia
- By: Anne Garrels
- Narrated by: Anne Garrels
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia, Garrels crafts an intimate portrait of the nation's heartland. We meet ostentatious mafiosos, upwardly mobile professionals, impassioned activists, scheming taxi drivers with dark secrets, and beleaguered steel workers. We discover surprising subcultures, like the LGBT residents of Chelyablinsk who bravely endure an upsurge in homophobia fueled by Putin's rhetoric of Russian "moral superiority" yet still nurture a vibrant if clandestine community of their own.
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Interesting dive into Russia today
- By Keith on 03-25-16
By: Anne Garrels
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Age of Ambition
- Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
- By: Evan Osnos
- Narrated by: Evan Osnos, George Backman
- Length: 16 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.
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Come back when you have a warrant!
- By Neuron on 11-06-15
By: Evan Osnos
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Strangers from a Different Shore
- A History of Asian Americans
- By: Ronald Takaki
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 24 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, and oral testimony, the author presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. This is a powerful and moving work that will resonate for all Americans, who together make up a nation of immigrants from other shores.
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Eye opening to the way immigrants are treated
- By Amazon Customer on 10-06-20
By: Ronald Takaki
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Fight Like Hell
- The Untold History of American Labor
- By: Kim Kelly
- Narrated by: Em Grosland
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.
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It is an important historical cause. Well written, well performed.
- By Amazon Customer on 06-18-24
By: Kim Kelly
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The Bonjour Effect
- The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed
- By: Julie Barlow, Jean-Benoit Nadeau
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow spent a decade traveling back and forth to Paris as well as living there. Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect, Jean-Benoît and Julie chronicle the lessons they learned after they returned to France to live, for a year, with their twin daughters. They offer up all the lessons they learned and explain the most important aspect of all: the French don't communicate, they converse.
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Terrible French pronunciation
- By CA on 01-24-19
By: Julie Barlow, and others
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The South Side
- A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation
- By: Natalie Y. Moore
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In this intelligent and highly important narrative, Chicago native Natalie Moore shines a light on contemporary segregation on the South Side of Chicago through reported essays, showing the lives of these communities through the stories of people who live in them. The South Side shows the important impact of Chicago's historic segregation and the ongoing policies that keep it that way.
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Eyeopening!
- By Ladybug on 09-07-16
By: Natalie Y. Moore
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Black Titan
- A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire
- By: Carol Jenkins
- Narrated by: Susan Spain
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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A.G. Gaston, the poor grandson of slaves, was born in the Deep South in 1892. Over the course of his extraordinary life, he amassed a fortune of over $130 million and a vast business empire. The story of his remarkable life is written with eloquence and grace by his niece, an Emmy¿ Award-winning journalist and her daughter, who holds degrees from Yale and Harvard.
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Black Gold = Standing Ovation
- By 2Fresh on 01-20-16
By: Carol Jenkins
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The Invitation-Only Zone
- The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project
- By: Robert S. Boynton
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout the late 1970s and early '80s, dozens of Japanese citizens were abducted from coastal Japanese towns by North Korean commandos. In what proved to be part of a global project, North Korea attempted to reeducate the abductees and train them to spy on the state's behalf. When the project faltered, the abductees were hidden in a series of guarded communities known as "Invitation-Only Zones" - the fiction being that these were exclusive enclaves, not prisons.
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Over enthusiastic reader!
- By AJW on 02-14-16
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No Go Zones
- How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You
- By: Raheem Kassam
- Narrated by: Ruairi Carter
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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No Go Zones. That's what they're called. And while the politically correct try to deny their existence, the shocking reality of these No Go Zones - where Sharia law can prevail and local police stay away - can be attested to by its many victims. Now Raheem Kassam, a courageous reporter and editor at Breitbart.com, takes us where few journalists have dared to tread - inside the No Go Zones, revealing areas that Western governments, including the United States, don't want to admit exist within their own borders.
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Wow
- By Stacie L Strader on 08-16-17
By: Raheem Kassam
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No Escape
- The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs
- By: Nury Turkel
- Narrated by: Stewart Lang
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful memoir by Nury Turkel lays bare China’s repression of the Uyghur people. Turkel is cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
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Powerfully Provocative
- By Amazon Customer on 06-01-22
By: Nury Turkel