Growing Up Brown in Vietnamese Culture
In high school they called me blackie, and the worst part was the laughter that came after. Not the word. The laughter. Easy, unbothered, expecting me to laugh along, because to flinch would have been to make it a thing, and making it a thing was my job to avoid. So I learned the skill every darker kid learns early: how to keep my face still while something small goes cold inside me. How to swallow a joke so nobody has to look at what the joke was actually saying.
What it was saying was simple. Closeness to Blackness lowers your worth. Nobody in that hallway would have put it that way. They didn't have to. The belief was already in the air all of us had been breathing since birth.
That belief has a name. It's anti-Blackness, and most people only recognize it in its loudest form. They picture burning crosses and slurs shouted from trucks. But it also lives quietly, as fear, as distance, as a ranking system people inherit without ever choosing it. It lives in the Vietnamese auntie warning a kid to stay out of the sun so they don't turn đen. It lives in the skin-whitening creams stacked at the front of every Asian beauty aisle, promising fairness like fairness is a destination. It lives in who gets cast as the prince and who gets cast as the peasant.
I know that last one because it happened to me.
I was volunteering at the Tet Festival in Garden Grove, the one in the big lot across from Bolsa Grande High School, lion dancers and incense smoke and the smell of grilled corn cutting through everything. They were handing out costumes for the cultural performance. The lighter-skinned kids became royalty: silk áo dài in gold and red, little crowns, the works. I was handed peasant clothes. Rough brown fabric. A farmer.
I shrugged it off out loud. Inside, I understood something I didn't yet have words for, which was that the casting wasn't random, and everyone could see it wasn't random, and nobody was going to say so. That is how colorism usually works. It arranges itself just quietly enough that you can be told you're imagining it, while you feel it land in your body with perfect clarity.
And here is the part that still gets me. This was our festival. The one day of the year built to celebrate who we are, our ancestors, our beginnings, our new year. Even there, on our own ground, the hierarchy had already decided which kind of Vietnamese face deserved the crown. We had carried it across an ocean with us. We unpacked it next to the lion dancers.
I want to be clear that I am not writing this from a finished place. I am writing it from inside the room. This is still happening. To me. This year. This month.
It happens over phở on a Sunday when an auntie tilts her head and tells me, half-laughing, that I've gotten too dark again. It happens when a Vietnamese friend introduces me to someone and the first joke out of his mouth is about my skin, and everyone laughs except the one Black person at the table, who looks at the floor. It happens when a relative talks about a Black neighborhood the way you'd talk about weather, like something to plan around. When a Vietnamese man at the salon says he could never bring home a dark girl. When Vietnamese people I love say things about Black people they would be horrified to hear quoted back, and then ask why I'm being so serious, can't you take a joke, Jeremy.
It feels like being asked to choose between my dignity and my belonging at the same table. It feels like the people who were supposed to be my mirror handed me a funhouse one instead and told me to be grateful for the reflection. And I am angry about it. Not in a way that's loud or showy. In a way that has settled into my chest like a low fire I cannot put out, and honestly do not want to, because that fire is the thing that finally taught me my brown skin was never the thing that needed fixing. The room was.
So let me say the harder thing, the thing the easy version skips, because the easy version is that some people are just mean and that lets everyone off the hook.
Vietnamese colorism did not begin with Vietnamese people. It was poured into us across centuries. A class system where pale skin meant you were rich enough to stay out of the rice fields and dark skin meant you worked under the sun to feed someone else. French colonizers who sat whiteness at the very top and made the rest of us sort ourselves underneath it. A global anti-Blackness that taught nearly every culture on earth to read darkness as danger and lightness as virtue. By the time my generation arrived, none of us invented any of it. We were just handed it, the way you're handed a language. You speak it fluently long before you understand what you're saying.
People call it preference. I just prefer lighter skin. But preference doesn't fall from the sky. A preference is the fingerprint history leaves on your desire. When millions of people across dozens of cultures all happen to want the exact thing colonialism rewarded, that is not a coincidence of taste. That is a system, working exactly as designed.
I want to be careful, because this is where the people I love stop listening. Plenty of Vietnamese families would be gutted to be called anti-Black. They adore their children. They crossed oceans for them, started over with nothing, worked themselves raw so the next generation could have softer hands. All of that is true. And it is also true that you can love your kids with your entire life and still pass down a hierarchy you never once examined. Inheriting a harmful belief doesn't make you a monster. The monstrous part only starts after you know, and choose to keep it anyway.
For a long time I knew without really knowing. Then I got to Berkeley, and two scholars on that same campus put the pieces together for me. One named the structure. The other named the mechanism.
Michael Dumas, an education scholar at Berkeley, argues in Against the Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse (2016) that anti-Blackness is not the same thing as racism in general. Racism can be measured as bias. Anti-Blackness is deeper, civilizational, baked into how the world imagines what a Black person fundamentally is. Schools, policing, beauty standards, the news — all of it sits on a foundation that quietly defines Blackness as the thing humanity is measured against. The closer you are to it by default, the less of that humanity gets extended to you.
That framing did something my own community had never offered me. It explained how Vietnamese people, who have themselves survived war, displacement, refugee camps, and a country that mispronounces our names, can still participate in anti-Blackness without ever seeing themselves as racist. Anti-Blackness existed before our diaspora arrived. It was waiting for us. And many in our community, hungry for a foothold in a country that treated them like permanent foreigners, reached for the easiest one available: standing on top of Blackness instead of beside it.
The second scholar was Serena Chen, a social psychologist at Berkeley whose work, especially The Relational Self: An Interpersonal Social-Cognitive Theory (Andersen & Chen, Psychological Review, 2002), explains why this stuff doesn't stay outside of us. You do not walk around with one fixed self. You carry mental representations of the significant people in your life, and depending on which one gets activated, a corresponding version of you switches on. The self is not a stone. It is a chord, and the people closest to you are pressing the keys.
The auntie who flinched at the sun. The uncle who muttered something ugly at the TV. The classmate who laughed in the hallway. The festival organizer who handed out the peasant fabric. Every one of those people became a significant-other representation lodged inside me, and every time one of them gets triggered in the present, a version of me activates that already believes the verdict. The self-concept I walked around with for years was not really mine. It was a residue.
Dumas explains why the structure exists. Chen explains how the structure gets inside your body and stays there. Both, in different vocabularies, are describing what happened to me at the Tet Festival in that peasant costume, and what is still happening to me at family dinners.
That was the moment the festival costume stopped being a slight and became evidence. I learned how the same logic sorts Black and brown children in American classrooms. How they get read as older than they are, as more threatening, as less innocent, punished harder for the exact things their lighter classmates get a smile for. Innocence, it turns out, is not handed to every child equally. It's rationed.
The anger I feel about this is not something I'm trying to resolve. It is something I'm trying to use. We are trained to rush past anger to get to the uplifting part faster, and I'm not going to do that. The anger was not bitterness. It was the clean, awake fury of finally seeing the wiring behind the wall. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
That fury is the engine of everything I make now. It's the bass line under every song I write, every dance I post, every video I send out as Jeremy Melodious. People sometimes ask me why I chose that name. Before I named myself, the world named me first. Blackie in the hallway. Peasant at the festival. Too dark at the dinner table. By the time I was old enough to choose, I had a whole collection of names handed to me that I never agreed to wear. So I picked one I did agree to. Melodious. Not because melody is whiteness. Not because music is escape. But because melody is what a body sounds like when it stops performing smallness. Because dance is what a brown body does when it refuses the script. Because a song you wrote yourself is the one name nobody can take back.
The system wants me to turn the hatred inward. That is the real win it's after, not my oppression out in the world but my agreement with it in private, the moment I look in the mirror and quietly side with the people who diminished me. Insecure people are easy to manage. Convince a man his own skin is a flaw and he'll spend his whole life chasing a finish line that keeps moving, too busy chasing to ever ask who painted it on the ground.
Chen's later research, on self-compassion, names what saved me from that. People who learn to treat themselves with the warmth they would offer a friend recover faster from social rejection, internalize criticism less, and stop confusing what was done to them with who they are. Self-compassion is not the bubble bath the internet sold you. It is a hard, deliberate refusal to take the world's verdict and make it your own. And the inspirational version always lies about this part: that refusal is daily work. It is not a switch I flipped once at Berkeley and finished. It is something I rebuild every time another Vietnamese person in my life makes another anti-Black remark and waits for me to laugh.
So I stopped chasing.
I love my brown skin now, and I mean it the way you mean something that took years to become real instead of a thing you say to feel better. I love that it deepens in the summer instead of apologizing for the sun. I love that it carries my grandmother, the boats, the rice fields, the whole impossible chain of people who survived enough for me to be standing here typing this. I love that the body in my videos, the body that danced its way into millions of views, the body that writes songs from a little apartment in Long Beach, is the same body I was once told to cover, lighten, shrink. Loving it, after a lifetime of being taught not to, is not vanity. It is resistance.
I don't want revenge on the kids in that hallway, or on the relatives still saying ugly things at dinner. Revenge is just the hierarchy wearing my face. What I want is harder, and better, and I want it badly enough to keep saying it until it lands. I want Vietnamese families to look the colorism in the eye and name it at the dinner table, in Vietnamese, where it lives. I want every Vietnamese kid in America who has ever been called too dark to learn this early: the voice in your head ranking you was installed, not inherited from God, and what was installed can be uninstalled. I want a dark-skinned kid at next year's Tet Festival, on that same lot across from Bolsa Grande, to be handed the crown. Or better, to walk in already knowing he was beautiful before anyone handed him anything at all.
Because here is the truth it took me a lifetime to reach and one second to understand:
My brown skin was never the problem. Blackness was never the danger. Melanin was never the flaw. The only problem was ever the hierarchy someone built and bolted onto our bodies, and anything that was built can be unbuilt. We were never broken. We were just standing inside something broken, mistaking its shape for our own.
And every day I stay in this skin without flinching — every song, every dance, every word I publish under the name I chose for myself — I am taking one bolt out.
Jeremy Melodious is a Vietnamese American creator, dancer, musician, and digital storyteller based in California. He writes about culture, creativity, identity, and what it means to build something real online. Explore his work at jeremymelodious.com or connect on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
0 comments