I Am Proud To Be Brown
I still remember a specific moment in middle school.
A teacher was handing back graded assignments and when she got to me, her tone shifted. Not dramatically. Just slightly. A half-second of recalibration I had learned to notice because I had been noticing it my whole life.
I did not say anything. I just took my paper and sat back down.
That is the thing about growing up brown. Nobody announces what is happening. It is quieter than that. It lives in tonal shifts, in who gets the benefit of the doubt first, in which features get praised immediately and which ones have to earn it.
I absorbed all of it before I had the language to explain it.
And honestly, a lot of brown and Black kids know exactly what I mean.
You feel it before you can name it. In classrooms, in beauty standards, in media, in dating culture, in who gets called professional and who gets called intimidating. You learn very early that skin color changes how the world moves around you, even when nobody says it out loud.
For a long time I internalized that pressure. I thought if I became more emotionally intelligent, more talented, more articulate, more kind, more successful, then people would finally see me softly.
What UC Berkeley helped me understand was that there was never anything wrong with my brownness in the first place.
The problem was living inside systems that conditioned people to associate lightness with safety and beauty while associating darkness with danger or suspicion.
Once I understood that, my entire perspective shifted.
Growing Up Brown Vietnamese American
I grew up Vietnamese American, and even inside Asian communities, colorism is real.
People do not always talk about it openly, but it exists. Lighter skin gets praised faster. Darker skin gets questioned more. Whiteness often gets unconsciously positioned as the beauty standard even in communities made up entirely of people of color.
That realization hurt when I was younger.
Today I approach it with compassion instead of shame, because these ideas did not appear out of nowhere. They were shaped through generations of colonialism, survival, media conditioning, and systems that rewarded proximity to whiteness.
Once I understood that history, I stopped blaming myself for internalizing it as a child. How could I not? Kids absorb the world exactly as it is presented to them.
And when you are brown, you often grow up learning how to emotionally navigate spaces before you even fully understand your own identity. It shapes a certain kind of awareness in you. A hypervigilance that, if you are lucky, eventually softens into something more useful.
My brown skin carries history. Survival. Migration. Sacrifice. Culture. Family. It carries generations of people who endured unimaginable things just so I could exist with opportunities they never had.
That realization fills me with gratitude.
UC Berkeley Changed The Way I Saw Myself
At UC Berkeley, I finally found language for experiences I had been carrying my entire life. I wrote about how that journey shaped my work in digital media, but the personal side of it runs much deeper.
Professors like Michael Dumas helped me understand that racism and colorism are not simply about individual people being hateful. These systems are embedded into culture itself. Into institutions, language, beauty standards, media representation, unconscious perception.
That understanding woke something up in me.
Because I realized my experiences were not isolated personal failures. They were connected to larger social patterns that millions of people of color navigate every day.
And honestly, that realization was healing. Not because it made me angry at the world, but because it helped me stop being angry at myself.
For so long I carried invisible pressure to prove I was safe, good, intelligent, worthy, in spaces where people unconsciously projected assumptions onto brown bodies. A lot of people of color know exactly what that exhaustion feels like. You become hyper-aware. Hyper-observant. Hyper-careful. You learn how to read rooms because sometimes your emotional safety genuinely depends on it.
But here is what I did not expect: that survival skill can evolve into something powerful.
Empathy. Emotional intelligence. Depth. The ability to read people and situations with a clarity that others sometimes have to work years to develop. I explored this more in my piece on Gen Z and emotional intelligence, but the root of it, for me, is lived experience. Being brown in spaces that were not built for you teaches you things no classroom fully can.
Serena Chen And Learning To Love Myself
Another professor who impacted me deeply was Serena Chen.
Her work on self-perception and social psychology helped me understand how environments shape identity from the inside out. When children constantly receive subtle messages about who is valued, beautiful, trusted, or important, those messages do not stay external. They become part of how you see yourself.
That realization changed my life because it helped me stop judging younger versions of myself for struggling.
I was never weak for wanting acceptance. I was human.
And one of the most powerful things I took from her work was this: self-compassion creates growth more effectively than self-criticism ever will.
Growing up, I thought being hard on myself would make me stronger. It did not. Real growth comes from safety. From gentleness. From learning how to speak to yourself with patience even after the world taught you otherwise.
That lesson healed something real in me.
I Am Proud Of My Brown Skin
Today I genuinely love being brown.
Not in a performative way. Not as a social media statement. I mean it in the quiet, private way you love something that has become inseparable from who you are.
I love the warmth in my skin. I love looking Vietnamese. I love carrying my culture with me everywhere I go. I love knowing my existence reflects generations of people who did not have the luxury of the life I have now.
The older I get, the more beautiful brown and Black skin becomes to me. Because I understand now what it carries. How much strength exists inside communities that were forced to fight for visibility and dignity for generations.
There is something that moves me about surviving systems designed to make you feel smaller and still choosing softness. Still choosing creativity. Still choosing kindness as something intentional, not passive.
That is not weakness. That is a choice. And it is one of the most powerful ones a person can make.
To Every Brown And Black Person Reading This
Your skin is not a limitation.
It is not something you need to overcome or apologize for. It carries history, ancestry, survival. And despite everything this world sometimes projects onto people of color, you are still here. Still creating. Still becoming.
More people are questioning old beauty standards. More people are healing from internalized racism and colorism instead of silently carrying it forever.
That healing matters. Because when you do it for yourself, you quietly give other people permission to do it too. That is how I think about the idea of world peace starting small, in the private shifts first, before anything becomes visible publicly.
Does Colorism Still Exist in Asian Communities?
Yes, and it rarely gets talked about honestly. Colorism within Asian communities is a direct inheritance of colonial beauty standards that positioned lighter skin as more desirable, more educated, more trustworthy. It shows up in skincare marketing, in family comments, in who gets centered in media. Acknowledging it is not an attack on the community. It is the first step toward healing something that has been quietly passed down for generations.
Closing
UC Berkeley did not hand me pride in my brownness.
That pride was always there. Waiting. Berkeley gave me the framework to finally understand why I had spent so many years separated from it.
Now when I look at myself I do not see someone compensating. I see resilience, culture, creativity, empathy, depth, survival. I see the specific face of a Vietnamese American kid from Garden Grove who had to learn, slowly, that he was allowed to take up space exactly as he was.
If you want to know more about where I come from and how I got here, that story is here.
And if any of this landed for you, I would genuinely love to hear it.
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.
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