What Is a Moreno Guy? Why I’m Proud to Be a Brown Moreno Man

Something has been changing in the way I see brown men represented, and I genuinely love watching it happen.

I notice it when I scroll through Instagram and TikTok. I notice it in football, fashion campaigns, television commercials, music videos, photography, and entertainment. I am seeing more beautiful brown men being photographed well, styled intentionally, celebrated publicly, and allowed to exist at the center of the image rather than somewhere in the background.

Maybe brown men are not suddenly everywhere. Maybe we were always here, and the world is simply becoming better at seeing us.

As a brown Vietnamese American guy, that shift feels deeply personal to me. I grew up receiving plenty of messages, some obvious and some incredibly subtle, suggesting that getting darker was somehow undesirable. Now I am watching younger generations openly celebrate golden skin, olive skin, caramel skin, deep brown skin, and melanin in ways I wish I had seen more often when I was growing up.

That makes me excited about where beauty standards might be heading.

What Is a Moreno Guy?

If you searched “what is a moreno guy,” “moreno guy meaning,” “moreno men,” or “moreno man,” the simplest answer is that moreno is a Spanish descriptor whose meaning can vary depending on culture and location.

A moreno guy may be someone with dark hair, darker features, a darker overall appearance, or tan, olive, caramel, brown, or deeper skin. The important thing to understand is that there is no single moreno look, and there is no single moreno ethnicity.

Moreno is not one race.

People described as moreno can come from very different racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds, which is why I think the term is most useful when it is treated as a flexible description rather than a rigid identity category.

For me personally, the broader idea of Moreno Men resonates because I have dark hair, brown features, and naturally brown skin. At the same time, I would never use moreno to replace the identities that actually define my cultural background.

I am Vietnamese American. I am Asian. I am brown.

Those things can exist together.

In my original article about Moreno Men and brown male beauty, I wrote about how Brown Asian men complicate the narrow stereotype that Asian men are supposed to look pale or light-skinned. Vietnamese, Filipino, Cambodian, Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, South Asian, mixed Asian, and other communities contain enormous ranges of complexion.

My brown skin does not make me less Vietnamese. It is one of the ways my Vietnamese identity physically appears on my body.

Growing Up Brown and Vietnamese American

I grew up in Garden Grove, California, surrounded by Vietnamese culture. Vietnamese restaurants, markets, festivals, food, family businesses, traditions, churches, temples, language, and community were simply part of everyday life.

Finding Vietnamese culture was never difficult for me.

Finding myself inside some of its beauty standards was more complicated.

I learned relatively young that lighter skin seemed to carry a certain kind of social value. Nobody needed to sit me down and formally explain colorism because children are incredibly good at noticing patterns before they understand the vocabulary behind them.

You notice who gets praised immediately. You notice who gets described as elegant or beautiful. You notice who is warned about getting darker and who never has to think about it.

Comments such as “Stay out of the sun,” “You’re getting darker,” or “You used to be lighter” may sound insignificant when heard once. When versions of the same message appear throughout childhood, beauty advertising, television, family conversations, and social interactions, they can slowly teach a child that lighter is something to move toward while darker is something to avoid.

That is how colorism can become normal without ever announcing itself.

The Tết Festival Memory I Still Think About

One memory from my childhood still stands out because I understand it very differently now than I did when it happened.

I was volunteering at a Vietnamese Tết festival in Garden Grove, surrounded by the kind of details that made the event feel unmistakably familiar: Vietnamese families, performances, cultural clothing, food, music, and all of the energy that comes with celebrating Lunar New Year.

For one of the cultural performances, children were being assigned costumes and roles. Some of the lighter-skinned kids were dressed as royalty in elaborate clothing, while I was given rougher brown clothing and assigned the role of a farmer.

At the time, I did not stand there thinking, This is a sociological example of colorism.

I was a kid.

I simply felt that something about the difference meant something.

Years later, the memory became easier to understand. Colorism often survives precisely because it does not always look dramatic enough for everyone to immediately name it. It can arrange people quietly enough that anyone who questions the arrangement can be told they are overthinking it.

What affected me most is that this happened in a space created to celebrate our own culture. Even within communities of color, beauty hierarchies can still be inherited, repeated, and normalized.

Acknowledging that does not mean rejecting Vietnamese culture. I love my culture deeply. It means loving a community enough to believe we can also examine the parts of our inherited thinking that may hurt people.

Being Called “Blackie” Taught Me Something I Understood Later

There were also moments when people called me “blackie” because of my darker complexion.

What stayed with me was not only the word itself. It was the laughter afterward and the expectation that I should laugh too.

When somebody makes a discriminatory joke, the person targeted by it often ends up carrying an extra responsibility: keeping everyone else comfortable. If I laughed, the joke could remain harmless in everybody else's mind. If I objected, I risked becoming the person who had suddenly “made it serious.”

So sometimes you absorb the moment instead.

That experience became one of the reasons I eventually started thinking more deeply about colorism, Blackness, and the social meaning people attach to darker skin. I explore that history much more directly in My Brown Skin Was Never the Problem: Colorism in Vietnamese Culture.

At the time, I did not have academic language for any of it.

UC Berkeley later gave me that language.

UC Berkeley Changed the Way I Understood My Brown Skin

Attending the University of California, Berkeley changed the way I understood identity because it gave me frameworks for experiences I had previously treated as random personal moments.

I began thinking more carefully about race, colorism, representation, beauty standards, media, and how social environments shape the way people see themselves.

That shift mattered because I stopped viewing every insecurity as an individual failure.

Sometimes we dislike parts of ourselves because we have repeatedly been taught that those parts carry less value.

Understanding that does not magically erase insecurity, but it gives you somewhere better to begin.

Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?”

I could finally ask, “Where did I learn that something was wrong with me?”

Those are completely different questions.

In UC Berkeley Made Me Proud to Be Brown, I wrote about how that education helped me recognize that my experiences were connected to larger systems involving beauty, race, representation, and unconscious perception rather than simply being evidence that I personally needed to change.

That realization helped me become much kinder to younger versions of myself.

Today, I Genuinely Love Being Brown

Today, I can say something very simply that would have felt much more complicated when I was younger:

I love being brown.

I do not mean that in a performative, social-media-affirmation kind of way. I mean it in the quiet way you eventually love something because you understand that it is inseparable from who you are.

I love the warmth in my complexion. I love looking Vietnamese. I love how my skin looks in photographs, and I no longer automatically think the lighter version of me is somehow the better one.

I also love what my appearance represents to me now.

Family.

Culture.

Migration.

History.

California sunlight.

Childhood.

Adulthood.

Every version of myself that has lived inside this body.

My previous writing describes that transformation in a way I still believe: the skin itself did not change. My understanding of it did.

Lamine Yamal Represents the Brown Visibility I Love Seeing

Lamine Yamal is one of the clearest examples of the kind of brown male visibility that makes me excited about modern culture.

He is young, globally recognizable, successful, visibly brown, and occupying the center of one of the biggest stages in sports.

When I include Lamine Yamal in a conversation about Moreno Men, I am not claiming that moreno is necessarily a personal identity label he uses for himself. That is something only he can define.

What I am talking about is representation.

When I see someone like Lamine Yamal photographed, celebrated, and admired internationally, I see a young brown man whose complexion is not being treated as something that needs to disappear in order for him to become globally marketable.

He does not have to become lighter to occupy the center of the image.

That might sound simple, but historically representation has not always been that simple.

For generations, darker people were often pushed toward very specific roles while lighter skin was disproportionately associated with glamour, innocence, prestige, romance, or social status.

That is why visibility matters to me.

Sometimes a brown kid simply needs to turn on a screen and see somebody who looks a little closer to him being treated like the main character.

What Brown Excellence Means to Me

When I use the phrase brown excellence, I want to be careful about what I mean.

I do not believe brown people are talented or exceptional because they are brown. Replacing one racial hierarchy with another would not be progress.

Brown excellence means people being able to accomplish extraordinary things without having to distance themselves from their brownness first.

A brown athlete can be globally celebrated while remaining visibly brown. A brown actor can play the romantic lead. A brown entrepreneur can look like himself in the boardroom. A brown creator can build an audience without editing his complexion lighter.

At the same time, I do not think representation should only celebrate exceptional people.

Sometimes I want the brown guy to be a world-famous athlete.

Sometimes I want him to be the scientist.

Sometimes I want him to be the love interest.

And sometimes I just want the random guy brushing his teeth in the commercial to be brown.

Being represented as ordinary is a kind of representation too.

What Is the Moreno Look?

Because people search terms such as “moreno look” and “moreno looks,” this deserves a direct answer.

There is no single physical appearance that defines Moreno Men.

Depending on context, someone described as moreno may have dark brown or black hair, brown eyes, warm undertones, olive skin, naturally tan skin, caramel skin, medium-brown skin, or deeper brown skin.

Those characteristics also exist across countless ethnic groups.

Two Vietnamese men can have noticeably different complexions. Two Latino men can look completely different from each other. The same is true within Black, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, Indigenous, mixed, and virtually every other population.

Human pigmentation exists on a spectrum.

That is precisely why the idea of one perfect shade has never made much sense to me.

I Think We Are Entering a Brown Beauty Era

One of the things I genuinely enjoy about social media right now is seeing how many different versions of brown masculinity are becoming visible at the same time.

I see brown athletes, fashion creators, musicians, dancers, models, actors, gamers, fitness creators, comedians, entrepreneurs, and people making completely unserious TikToks from their bedrooms.

That variety matters because representation becomes more powerful when people are allowed to have different personalities.

The brown man does not always need to be mysterious.

He does not always need to be tough.

He does not always need to be hypermasculine.

He can be funny, awkward, emotional, stylish, shy, confident, athletic, creative, nerdy, sensitive, ambitious, or something completely different depending on the day.

Social media helped make that possible because it weakened part of the old gatekeeping system.

For most of modern mass media, somebody else had to decide whether your face belonged in front of a large audience. Today, a creator can pull out a phone, make something authentic, and potentially reach millions of people without asking a studio executive for permission.

Algorithms can absolutely reproduce existing beauty biases, but they can also interrupt them.

Every Brown Asian creator who confidently posts himself without trying to digitally lighten his complexion adds another image to what people understand Asian beauty and masculinity can look like. That is something I explored in my original Moreno Men article as well.

Gen Z Is More Willing to Question Old Beauty Standards

I do not think Gen Z eliminated racism or colorism.

We obviously did not.

What I do notice is that younger generations appear much more comfortable publicly questioning standards that previous generations were often expected to accept without discussion.

Why does professional have to look one way?

Why does masculinity have to look one way?

Why does Asian have to look one way?

Why should lighter automatically mean more beautiful?

Why are we still acting as though someone getting darker during summer is some kind of emergency?

Gen Z grew up with access to millions of people outside traditional television and magazines. That means we are constantly exposed to different skin tones, body types, hair textures, gender expressions, ethnic features, and versions of masculinity.

The traditional beauty gatekeepers still exist.

They are simply no longer the only people controlling the image.

That is an important cultural shift.

Brown People Should Never Be Afraid of Being Brown

This is something I wish every darker-skinned kid could understand early in life:

Your complexion is not a problem waiting to be fixed.

You should not automatically prefer every photograph where you happen to look lighter. You should not spend your summer worrying that becoming more tan somehow moved you further away from beauty.

Most importantly, you should not spend years imagining that a lighter version of yourself would automatically deserve more love, respect, or opportunity.

Skin tone does not determine intelligence, cleanliness, class, professionalism, morality, masculinity, or human value.

Those meanings are socially assigned.

And because they are learned, they can also be questioned.

Why Did Darker Characters So Often Feel Like Villains?

One of the reasons I became interested in media analysis was because I started noticing patterns before I knew exactly how to explain them.

I remember thinking about how often darkness seemed visually connected with danger.

Villains could be darker, rougher, more shadowed, or more threatening, while innocence and beauty were more frequently represented through softer and lighter imagery.

Obviously, that does not describe every movie or every television show.

The more interesting issue is what happens when audiences repeatedly encounter similar associations.

People learn through repetition.

If darker characters repeatedly appear as dangerous while lighter characters repeatedly appear innocent, desirable, wealthy, or trustworthy, those patterns can become cultural background noise even when nobody consciously announces what they are teaching.

That is part of why media representation goes deeper than simply counting how many brown people appear on screen.

Who gets to be the hero matters.

Who gets to be vulnerable matters.

Who falls in love matters.

Who gets protected matters.

Who gets photographed beautifully matters.

And who is allowed to simply be human matters.

What Michael Dumas Taught Me About Anti-Blackness

One of the most important frameworks I encountered at UC Berkeley came through Michael J. Dumas and his work on anti-Blackness.

What I took from that scholarship was the understanding that racism cannot always be reduced to individual people consciously deciding to hate somebody. Social hierarchies can become embedded in institutions, media, language, education, beauty standards, and ordinary assumptions people inherit before they are old enough to interrogate them.

That framework changed the way I understood some of the jokes I heard growing up.

If calling a darker Vietnamese child “Black” was supposed to function as an insult, then the deeper question was not simply why somebody was teasing me.

The deeper question was:

Why was Blackness available as the insult in the first place?

The joke only works if everyone already understands an underlying hierarchy in which proximity to Blackness is supposed to lower somebody's social value.

That is where anti-Blackness becomes essential to the conversation.

My Experience Is Not the Same as a Black Man’s Experience

This distinction is extremely important to me.

My experience as a brown Vietnamese American man is not the same as the experience of a Black man living within a society shaped by anti-Black racism.

Understanding the colorism or discrimination I experienced does not require me to absorb somebody else's racial history into my own.

Those experiences can intersect without becoming interchangeable.

My previous writing about Michael Dumas emphasizes exactly that point: compassion requires recognizing differences in history, power, and consequence rather than turning every experience of discrimination into one universal story.

Asian communities can experience racism.

Asian communities can experience colorism.

Asian communities can also reproduce anti-Black attitudes.

All three realities can exist simultaneously.

That is why I believe solidarity begins with accuracy rather than comparison.

We Cannot Discuss Colorism Without Examining Anti-Blackness

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable, but I think discomfort is sometimes necessary for understanding.

If darker Asian children are insulted by comparing them negatively to Black people, it is not enough to examine only the harm being done to the Asian child.

We also need to examine why Blackness was positioned as something negative in the first place.

Colorism within Vietnamese and other Asian communities has many historical influences. Class, colonialism, labor, migration, beauty standards, and local cultural beliefs all matter.

Anti-Blackness does not explain every form of colorism.

But it can help us understand why darkness sometimes becomes culturally associated with danger, poverty, dirtiness, or lower social status across communities that otherwise have very different histories.

That is why my earlier Moreno Men writing makes an important distinction: Brown Asian men can be affected by a hierarchy partly shaped through anti-Blackness without occupying the same position Black men occupy within that hierarchy.

That is the kind of conversation I want to keep having.

Colorism Can Become Psychological Before We Realize It

One of the most difficult things about colorism is what happens after the outside message becomes internal.

Eventually, nobody needs to tell you that you look too dark.

You start monitoring yourself.

You compare photographs. You evaluate the lighting. You wonder whether you would look more attractive, approachable, professional, or socially acceptable if your skin appeared slightly lighter.

At that point, the hierarchy is no longer only outside of you.

You have started observing yourself through the imagined eyes of other people.

That is why learning about colorism was ultimately freeing for me.

It helped me understand that some of the things I once criticized about myself did not originate inside me. They had been reflected back to me repeatedly through a culture with its own inherited assumptions about beauty.

Once I understood where those assumptions came from, I could decide whether I actually wanted to keep them.

Skin-Lightening Culture Shows How Deep Beauty Standards Can Go

The global popularity of skin-lightening products is another example of how deeply ideas about complexion can become tied to beauty and status.

When advertising repeatedly presents lighter skin as more attractive, sophisticated, successful, or desirable, the product is selling more than a cosmetic result.

It is selling a hierarchy.

There is an important distinction here.

Some people work with qualified dermatologists to treat hyperpigmentation, discoloration, or specific skin conditions. That is completely different from teaching somebody that their natural base complexion itself is undesirable.

I want people to take care of their skin because they value it.

I do not want younger brown people growing up believing skincare means escaping the color they naturally have.

And Yet People Spend Money Trying to Look More Tan

This is one of the strangest contradictions in modern beauty culture.

Some brown children grow up hearing, “Don't get too dark.”

At the same time, entire beauty categories revolve around bronzer, self-tanner, spray tans, bronzing drops, “sun-kissed” makeup, and products designed to create more warmth in the complexion.

That contradiction is worth thinking about.

It does not mean everybody should deliberately tan or expose themselves to unhealthy amounts of UV radiation.

The point is cultural.

If warmth, bronze, and deeper color can be sold as desirable beauty aesthetics, then naturally brown skin was clearly never inherently unattractive.

The problem was never the pigment.

The problem was the hierarchy attached to it.

Hollywood Is Finally Learning How Beautiful Brown Men Can Be

I notice a difference when I watch television, streaming shows, advertising, music videos, and fashion campaigns today.

I see more brown men being photographed beautifully.

Styled beautifully.

Lit beautifully.

Presented romantically.

Allowed to look elegant, expensive, cute, funny, intellectual, sexy, vulnerable, and soft.

That last part matters to me.

I do not want every brown character to exist only so that a script can teach audiences about racism. Representation also means allowing people of color to participate in completely ordinary stories.

Sometimes I want the romantic lead to be brown without the movie needing to explain why.

Sometimes I want the character everybody has a crush on to simply look like someone who would have been considered outside the traditional beauty standard a generation earlier.

That kind of normalization can be powerful precisely because it stops feeling unusual.

Brown Men Deserve Appreciation Without Fetishization

Better representation can create another problem if society simply replaces rejection with fetishization.

There is a difference between saying:

Brown men are beautiful.

and turning every brown man into the same fantasy of somebody “exotic,” aggressive, dominant, dangerous, or mysterious.

Real appreciation leaves room for the entire person.

A brown man can be athletic and sensitive.

Masculine and gentle.

Funny and insecure.

Ambitious and awkward.

Creative and disciplined.

Outgoing one day and completely introverted the next.

My original Moreno Men article makes this distinction clearly: brown male beauty should recognize physical attraction while also making room for emotional, intellectual, cultural, and individual humanity.

Being seen is not the same thing as being reduced.

Brown Men Should Have the Right to Be Soft

I dance.

I make music.

I care about fashion.

I create videos.

I think deeply about emotions and identity.

None of those things exists outside my masculinity.

They are part of it.

The freedom I want for Moreno Men and Brown Asian men is not simply permission to be seen as strong or attractive.

I want brown men to be allowed to be emotionally dimensional.

Strong without pretending they never hurt.

Confident without becoming emotionally hard.

Masculine without performing somebody else's version of masculinity.

Beautiful without becoming a stereotype.

That is a much more interesting version of representation.

Brown Skin Was Beautiful Before Social Media Discovered It

This is probably the most important thing I want people to take away from this article.

Brown people did not suddenly become beautiful because social media started celebrating us.

Lamine Yamal did not make brown skin beautiful.

Gen Z did not make brown skin beautiful.

Hollywood did not make brown skin beautiful.

TikTok did not make brown skin beautiful.

We were already beautiful.

We were beautiful when cameras exposed darker skin poorly.

We were beautiful when casting directors preferred lighter faces.

We were beautiful when relatives warned children about spending too much time in the sun.

We were beautiful when beauty companies marketed fairness as aspiration.

The meaningful change is not our appearance.

The meaningful change is our willingness to question the standards through which we learned to judge it.

I once viewed my caramel complexion as distance from an ideal.

Now I see family, Vietnamese history, culture, California sunlight, childhood, adulthood, and every version of Jeremy that this body has carried.

The skin did not change.

My understanding did.

I Want the Next Generation to Love Being Brown Earlier Than I Did

This is ultimately why I am so optimistic about the visibility I am seeing today.

Imagine a brown kid growing up in a world where his favorite athlete is brown, the fashion model is brown, the romantic lead is brown, the creator on his For You Page is brown, and the character everybody thinks is cool is brown.

Nobody has to stop and explain why those people deserve to be beautiful.

They simply are.

That changes the visual world available to a young person.

I hope younger brown kids never spend years wishing photographs made them look lighter.

I hope nobody makes them afraid of summer.

I hope nobody teaches them that looking darker makes them less Asian, less Vietnamese, less attractive, or less worthy.

And I hope that when somebody tries to use Blackness as an insult, the people around them understand enough about anti-Blackness to challenge what that joke is really saying.

Most importantly, I hope younger people learn to see themselves as beautiful before the world gets the opportunity to convince them otherwise.

Frequently Asked Questions About Moreno Men

What does Moreno Men mean?

Moreno Men generally refers to men described as having dark hair, darker features, or tan, olive, caramel, brown, or deeper skin depending on cultural context. The exact meaning of moreno varies across Spanish-speaking countries and communities.

What is a moreno guy?

A moreno guy is generally a man described as moreno. Depending on where and how the term is being used, it may refer to dark hair, darker features, naturally tan or brown skin, or an overall darker appearance.

What does “moreno guy meaning” refer to?

People searching “moreno guy meaning” are usually asking what the Spanish word moreno means when used to describe a man. It is a flexible descriptor rather than the name of one specific race or ethnicity.

Is moreno an ethnicity?

No. There is no single moreno ethnicity. People who are described as moreno can come from many different racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds.

What is the moreno look?

There is no single moreno look. Moreno Men may have dark hair, brown eyes, warm undertones, olive skin, tan skin, caramel skin, brown skin, or deeper features depending on the person and cultural context.

Can Asian men be considered Moreno Men?

Some Brown Asian men may personally connect with the broader description of Moreno Men because they have dark hair, darker features, and naturally tan, golden, caramel, or brown skin. The term should not be automatically imposed on somebody who does not identify with it.

Are Vietnamese men considered brown?

Vietnamese people have a wide range of complexions. Some Vietnamese men, including me, describe themselves as brown because of naturally tan, golden, caramel, or deeper skin, while other Vietnamese people may use different language to describe themselves.

Are Moreno Men and Black men the same thing?

No. Moreno is not another word for Black. Moreno Men can come from many different backgrounds, while Black identity has specific histories and experiences shaped by anti-Black racism. Brown people may experience colorism without experiencing racism in the same way as Black people.

What does brown male beauty mean?

Brown male beauty means recognizing men with olive, tan, caramel, brown, and deeper complexions as beautiful without reducing them to racial stereotypes or sexual fetishes. It includes their physical beauty while also recognizing their emotional, cultural, intellectual, and individual humanity.

Why does brown skin representation matter?

Brown skin representation expands the types of people audiences repeatedly see as attractive, successful, romantic, intelligent, fashionable, powerful, vulnerable, and fully human. Representation alone cannot eliminate racism or colorism, but it can broaden what younger people are able to imagine for themselves.

I’m Proud to Be a Brown Moreno Man

After everything I have learned about media, psychology, colorism, anti-Blackness, representation, and beauty standards, I keep returning to a conclusion that is much simpler than the theory behind it.

I am proud of my brown skin.

I am proud of being Vietnamese American.

I am proud of being Asian.

And I am proud to contribute my own perspective to a larger conversation about Moreno Men, Brown Asian men, brown male beauty, and the changing way darker skin is being represented.

I feel something when I see somebody like Lamine Yamal occupying an enormous global stage while remaining visibly brown.

I feel something when I see a brown man photographed beautifully in a fashion campaign.

I feel something when a Brown Asian creator posts a photograph without trying to make himself look lighter.

But what makes me happiest is hearing a younger brown person say something as simple as:

“I like being brown.”

That sentence should never have needed to feel revolutionary.

Eventually, I hope it doesn't.

I also do not want brown beauty to become another hierarchy. The goal is not to replace lighter is better with darker is better.

That would miss the entire point.

Light skin can be beautiful. Golden skin can be beautiful. Olive skin can be beautiful. Caramel skin can be beautiful. Brown skin can be beautiful. Deep skin can be beautiful.

Beauty never needed a racial ranking system in the first place.

So I hope we keep showing brown men.

I hope we keep casting brown men.

I hope photographers continue learning how to light every complexion beautifully.

I hope brown men keep showing up in sports, fashion, television, music, business, social media, and entertainment without having to explain why they belong there.

And I hope we allow brown men to be romantic, intelligent, stylish, weird, funny, emotional, masculine, soft, athletic, creative, successful, awkward, and completely human.

If you are a brown guy who found this article because you searched “what is a moreno guy?”, I hope you leave with more than a definition.

I hope you leave understanding that your skin was never something you needed to overcome.

You never needed to become lighter to deserve the light.

Brown is beautiful, and it always was.

— Jeremy Melodious

If this perspective resonated with you, continue with my original essay on Moreno Men and Brown Male Beauty, read My Brown Skin Was Never the Problem: Colorism in Vietnamese Culture, or learn more about how UC Berkeley Made Me Proud to Be Brown.

You can also explore more essays about identity, culture, media, Gen Z, and modern life through Jeremy's Perspectives or browse the complete Jeremy Melodious Blog.