An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial,
globe-trotting family's journey as she reckons with ethnicity and
belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a
multicultural household.
Charlotte Gill's father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in
1960's London when the world is not quite 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. Together they set off on a journey from
the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit
of life, liberty, and happiness--a dream 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 she finds herself distancing from her father
too--why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not
her mom?--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
society? 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 does your relationship with your
parents change as you change and grow older?
*
In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines
the brilliant messiness of ancestry, "diversity," and the idea of
"race," a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about
ethnicity today.