An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity, and race today.
Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. And although they couldn’t be more different, they meet in 1960’s London when, despite the prevailing image of free love, the world was not ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Along the way, they venture from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness-a pursuit that eventually tears them apart.
Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving parents of two different races and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes Eventually, her parents drift apart because they just aren’t compatible. But as Charlotte finds herself distancing from her father too, she doesn’t know if it’s because of his personality or his race. As a mixed-race child, was this her own unconscious bias, favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug of war that plagues our country? Almost Brown looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people. What are you? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? And how did your parents see it then and now?
With dazzling, unflinching prose, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ethnicity, ancestry, diversity, and the idea of race, a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today and its impact on her own mixed race family.
