Brown people need a grand story, and there’s no one definitive account

Kamal Al-Solaylee is an associate professor at the School of Journalism at Ryerson University. His first book Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes won the Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, a Lambda Literary Award, and CBC’s Canada Reads. Born in Yemen, Al-Solaylee was the national theatre critic for The Globe and Mail and holds a PhD in Victorian literature from the University of Nottingham. He lives in Toronto. Al-Solaylee is shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust’s Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), published by HarperCollins Canada. The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize winner will be announced at the Politics & the Pen gala in Ottawa on May 10. 
Kamal Al-Solaylee, author of Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), published by HarperCollins Canada: 'For much of our history, we’ve been defined by others—as the brown race, as the weaker tribe, as the civilization-ready subjects of empires. But the time has come for us to self-identify as we wish.'
THE NUMBERS AND STATS tell one part of the story of being brown in one part of the world, North America. But numbers alone can’t and don’t reveal the personal, the emotional, the stories, the heartbreaks and triumphs behind this or that percentage of brown clout or political ca...

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