Being Brown, Being Down

Being Brown

Mo Amer’s Vagabond is framed by his migration story, beginning with his childhood in Kuwait as the son of Palestinian parents. His father’s well-paying telecommunications job afforded the family stability, and Amer attended a British private school, describing himself as “an adorable Arab kid with a hint of a British accent.” That stability collapsed during the first Gulf War in 1990, when, due to Kuwait’s refusal to grant citizenship to nonnationals, Amer and his family—stateless and displaced—were forced to flee. They eventually sought refugee status in the United States, resettling in Houston. In the special, Amer recounts this dangerous exodus and reflects on his life as a refugee navigating America both before and after 9/11. Touring internationally on a refugee travel document, he uses his comedy to explore how his brown, bearded body becomes a site of layered imperial legacies, his very existence one of ontological instability. A recurring theme in Vagabond is his experience of being repeatedly misread in the United States, mistaken for a Latino man.

In his stand-up, Amer jokes that in the context of the war on terror, being read as a Latino man can feel like the safer option. Yet this doesn’t mean that Latino men are free from racialized violence. As Gilberto Rosas explains, the Latino body is often perceived as “an unremarkable mestizo”—the default body across Latin America, one that is “racialized and inserted into the logic of U.S. racial terror . . . antagonized by white supremacy . . . stereotyped, segregated, criminalized, and overpoliced in the expansion of the southern U.S. border.”29 Amer mines these layers of misrecognition for humor, but his comedy also reveals the interontological positioning of brownness: how brown bodies, though legible in different ways, are persistently shaped by overlapping systems of imperial control and racial surveillance.

In Vagabond, Amer recounts his early years adapting to life in Houston as a young brown migrant, using a comedic anecdote about being caught between rival Mexican and Black American gangs in his neighborhood. “The Mexican gangs wanted to recruit me cause they thought I was Mexican. The Black gangs wanted to beat me up cause they thought I was Mexican. Really tough high school years,” he jokes. He reenacts a tense encounter with a Black gang member who mistakes him for Latino: “Say, ‘José’! You in the wrong motherfuckin’ neighborhood, ‘José.’” Terrified, young Amer replies, “Come on, man. My name is Mohammed,” prompting the gangster to back off and say, “Salaam alaikum, brother, shit, my bad!” The humor arises from the sudden shift in how Amer’s body is read—from threatening outsider to religious kin. This misrecognition reveals the volatility of brown embodiment: In some contexts, being read as Latino invites violence; in others, being recognized as Muslim offers unexpected solidarity. The scene also subtly gestures to historical intersections between Black Americans and Arab Muslims through shared cultural and religious practices.

Amer continues the story with another misidentification—this time by a Mexican gang member who confronts him in Spanglish: “Say, vato! You walk by here every day. You don’t say nothin’, don’t do nothin’. What? You ashamed of your own peoples, bro? . . . This is your familia, bro! Your raza, bro! . . . Ándale, bro. You going to get broke today, bro. What’s your name, bro?” The gang member assumes Amer is Mexican and accuses him of acting distant. When asked his name, a nervous young Amer responds, “My name is Mohammed.” The tension breaks as the gangster backs off, stunned: “What? For real, bro? You look exactly like Hector!” He calls over Hector to meet his lookalike, and Amer, playing his younger self, exclaims with surprise and delight, “Holy shit, I do look like Hector!” The audience erupts in laughter. This scene plays with the familiar trope of misrecognition, but from a different angle—one that highlights shared features and unexpected kinship. Amer’s performance also shows his fluency in the ethnic vocabulary of Mexican Spanish, particularly the use of raza, a term rooted in the ideology of mestizaje and deployed to forge solidarity among those shaped by Spanish colonialism.

Amer’s Vagabond presents this mutual belonging beyond ethnic differences as strategic interchangeability. In his performance, Amer takes advantage of the United States’ homogenizing gaze on brownness and learns how to carefully disguise himself as “Hector” to minimize the risk of Islamophobic violence. “They started hunting Arabs and Muslims,” says Amer looking frightened while transitioning to a joke that addresses the transformations in what we describe as the official nationalizing affect after the attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent war on terror: “That’s why you’ve gotta think of, like, backup plans and exit strategies. It’s important. I learned from being a refugee, you’ve gotta have plan B . . . and C and D. That’s why I learned Spanish. Just in case some shit breaks out, I can camouflage at any moment in time. It’s gettin’ rough, man.” Performing a hypothetical racist attack, Amer sets up a sequence on the difficulties of living in the United States as an Arab immigrant. Amer performs a white man who, in a thick country accent and pointing a rifle, aggressively asks him: “Hey, boy! Hey, boy, you one of them A-rabs, huh? You one of them Muslims, huh?” Amer responds to the threat of violence by completely transforming himself, dropping his chin, and tensing his shoulders while replying in convincingly accented Mexican Spanish: “No, vato, come on. . . . Sí. Yo regreso a mi país, Mexico!—[returning to his regular voice] And just get the fuck out of there. Jump over that unfinished fence, you know what I mean?” To pacify the violence of the nativist and prevent Islamophobic violence, Amer camouflages as Hector. Taking advantage of racial superimposition, Amer resignifies his brownness into something the nativist apparently perceives as less threatening.

Amer uses the same device of humorous misidentification in a joke about his nine-year-old nephew named Osama. “I mean,” says Amer, commenting on his name, “what this poor kid had to endure! I hate that fact. There’s so many terrorist acts done by white people, not a single person is changing their kid’s name from being Timothy, right?”30 In the context of post-9/11 Islamophobic profiling, Amer narrates a story about taking his nephew to buy video games at Walmart for his birthday. Like most kids his age, Amer’s nephew started running uncontrollably around the store. Amer’s instincts of yelling his nephew’s name to make him come back are silenced by the realization of how a bearded brown man screaming “Osama” might be misinterpreted. Amer performs the frightening and hilarious situation for his audience: “I can’t call him,” he narrates. “I’m sitting there like, ‘Hey, Osa . . . Pssssssst! Pssssst! Sammy!’ That’s a good one. ‘Hey, Sammy, come here!’” Amer describes the visceral reaction his nephew had to him using an anglicized version of his name to call him. “He was like, ‘No! My name’s Osamaaaaa!’ I’m like, ‘Shut up!’ You know? [mumbling in Spanish] I just got the fuck out of there.” To dissipate the tension produced by his nephew’s name and prevent the possibility of violence, Amer recounts how he grabbed little Osama by his hand and walked backward out of the store while rambling on apologetically in Spanish.

In both encounters, Amer’s recurring character Hector functions as a Muñozian theory of “methexis”—a form of performance that surpasses mere imitation (mimesis) and becomes a shared, participatory moment: “a kind of commons . . . not made by the performance” but revealed through it.31 Amer accesses the brown commons by leaning into misrecognition, not resisting it. While centering his experience as an Arab refugee marked by post-9/11 stereotypes, Amer simultaneously connects to broader narratives of migration and racialization along the US southern border. The irony of his camouflage is that Hector is also a target of racism—he too must flee over “unfinished fences” or quietly exit spaces like Walmart. Amer’s embodiment of Hector underscores that brownness cannot assimilate into whiteness as European ethnic people once did.32 Its social life emerges not through proximity to whiteness but through the fluid, relational space of the brown commons. His transformation is not mimicry in Homi K. Bhabha’s sense of colonized imitation but a concerted shift, a move toward passing as someone else, allowed by brown interontology—where being mistaken for another brown body becomes a moment of recognition, not erasure.33

Amer borrows from what Morgan identifies as a quintessentially African American satirical mode, one in which audiences are encouraged to “laugh to keep from dying,” a survival tactic that resists the lethal violence of racism, particularly anti-Blackness.34 Morgan argues that this tactic functions in two ways: first, it offers protection through the plausible deniability of “just jokes,” and second, it cultivates an interior in-group space that wards off psychic or even physical death. A student and mentee of Dave Chappelle—whom Morgan names a master of this form—Amer mobilizes both registers. With the first, he has made perhaps the most unlikely audience laugh: US and coalition troops across twenty-seven countries, including Afghanistan, performing comedy for the very war machine responsible for his displacement. With the second, he recognizes an interior brown in-group between Arabs and Latinos, theorizing brownness’s interontological positioning and showing how brown people exploit their ambiguity and interchangeability to evade the state’s quarantining, torturing, and displacing of those marked as enemies.

Yet the very logic of relational recognition that structures the brown commons also raises a critical limit. Afropessimist scholars, notably Frank B. Wilderson III, argue that Blackness occupies a singular position within racialization because its foundation—slavery—is a “constitutive element” rather than a historical event.35 For Wilderson, Blackness has no analogy. Its condition is not produced through exclusion from the social order but through its indispensable inclusion as the ground upon which the social is built. In this sense, anti-Blackness is not simply one form of racial discrimination among others but the structural matrix that makes racial difference itself legible. The afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman notes, endures in the very logics of property, law, and personhood that organize the modern world.36 Afropessimism thus maintains that comparative framework of racialization and must reckon with Blackness as a position of ontological negation that cannot be subsumed into analogy without distortion, even as such analogies are repeatedly produced in colonial practice. Afropessimism therefore insists that any comparative framework of racialization must begin from this foundational nonanalogous position of Blackness, a position of ontological negation that underwrites the possibility of all other identities.

Unlike Blackness, brownness emerges precisely through analogy. Sumita Chakraborty describes this as “compulsory analogy,” arguing that brown identity is “positioned as being comprehensible only through the positing of an analogical relation.”37 We suggest that analogical relation—the substitution of one racialization for another—is brownness’s constitutive element derived from the New Worlding grammar inaugurated by European settler colonialism and imperialism. This grammar is exemplified by Christopher Columbus’s misrecognition of Indigenous Americans; he repeatedly insisted he had reached South Asia and thus fostered the term Indios to refer to the brown-skinned peoples of the so-called New World. Columbus’s mistake was not just historical, it was globally transformative. Under the continued dominance of the Global North, many Indigenous peoples are still called, and call themselves, “Indian.” Nabil Matar argues that early modern European conceptions of Muslims were shaped through analogies with colonial encounters with Native Americans.38 Writers like Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas encouraged English readers to understand the Muslim world through the same racial and religious tropes used to describe Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Thus, brownness has historically lacked a singular ontology of its own, continually emerging from in between and overlapping racialization. As Matar notes, this superimposition process produced a portable framework of otherness, which was “conscious and deliberate.”39

This superimposition should not be confused with historical narratives such as the “browning of Spain” by the Moors and the subsequent cultural and biological “admixtures” brought to Latin America via Spanish colonialism.40 While these narratives of racial and cultural mixing—including contemporary romanticized versions of mestizaje—have shaped conceptions of brownness, they differ significantly from what we call “brown interontology.” The ideology of mestizaje stands as one of the most enduring and contradictory legacies of European colonialism in the Americas. Rooted in the violent sexual economy of conquest, mestizaje transformed racial mixture into an epistemology of governance. As Alicia Arrizón notes, this process began in the colonial contact zone, where asymmetrical power between colonizers and colonized produced categories such as “mestizo” and “mulatto.”41 Codified in the casta system, these classifications linked phenotype to hierarchy, turning the mixed body into both a symbol of civility and an object of regulation.42

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mestizaje was reimagined as a myth of national unity: José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (1925) cast mixture as postracial destiny, claiming that the fusion of European, Indigenous, and African peoples would heal colonial wounds through the emergence of a “cosmic race.”43 Across Latin America, this utopian vision translated difference into harmony and progress—the mestizo became the modern citizen, while Black and Indigenous peoples were relegated to the role of cultural ancestors. Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of mestiza consciousness both critiques and reworks mestizaje.44 While she rejects Vasconcelos’s homogenizing and Eurocentric fantasy of racial fusion, she nonetheless reclaims mixture as a counterhegemonic, decolonial, and queer epistemology that embraces hybridity and border crossing. By contrast, Ed Morales foregrounds the structural limits of mestizaje, arguing that its fantasy of unity depends on the ongoing erasure of Blackness and Indigeneity and the normalization of Eurocentric ideals.45 Morales shows how the Latin American inversion of the US “one-drop rule” enabled majorities to imagine themselves white, sustaining pigmentocracies that deny racism as a structural reality. As Peter Wade observes in the Colombian context, mestizaje “allowed the simultaneous existence of racism and nonracism,” institutionalizing inclusion through whitening and embedding racial hierarchy within the very discourse of equality.46

Unlike mestizaje, brown interontology is constituted not by celebratory narratives of cultural blending and inclusion but by acts of racial exclusion: the expulsion of the Moors from Spain (marked by the Reconquista’s completion in 1492, coinciding with Columbus’s arrival in the Americas) and from England (evidenced by Queen Elizabeth’s 1601 proclamation deporting “Negroes and Blackamoors”).47 Emily C. Bartels’s account of the early modern Moor supports this genealogy of brownness by revealing that “the Moor” was never a stable racial category but a site of threatening ambiguity that had to be expelled or even killed on the Renaissance stage.48 As Bartels shows, the term encompassed a shifting range of geographies, religions, skin tones, and political identities—sometimes Berber, sometimes Arab, sometimes sub-Saharan African, sometimes Indian, sometimes simply “foreign,” and often simultaneously all of these. This indeterminacy was the defining feature of the Moor’s early modern life on the English stage: a figure who unsettled fixed racial taxonomies by occupying an “uncodified and uncodifiable” space between Europe, Africa, and the larger Islamic world.49 When read alongside Anouar Majid’s argument in We Are All Moors—which links the Moor’s expulsion from Spain to contemporary forms of xenophobia—and the post-9/11 racialization of Muslims as “terrorists,” we see that the Moor’s ambiguous placement in early modern racial imaginaries prefigures the analogical slippages that structure the contemporary condition of brownness.50

Brownness’s slippery in-betweenness has continued to generate anxiety at both ends of the white–Black racial binary. Contemporary white nationalism perceives the presence of Latinos and Muslims in the Global North as a threat—fueling conspiracies like the so-called Great Replacement, which imagines the erasure of white Christian dominance. Conversely, white neoliberalism seems to follow the romanticization of mestizaje and celebrates this same demographic shift as a multicultural ideal, envisioning a colorblind capitalist future. In his mapping of racial taxonomies of brownness from the eighteenth century to now, Patterson points out, “As the last color to be used by racial scientists, ‘brownness’ has [historically] delineated racial hierarchies in between blackness and whiteness, that, to colonial powers, emphasizes the possible degradation of whiteness or, to the colonized, promises of future induction into whiteness.”51 Meanwhile, Blackness—although structurally disempowered—also shapes perceptions of brownness. Jared Sexton critiques multiculturalism for merely shifting rather than challenging white supremacy, noting that “the browning of America discloses the uneven and uneasy camaraderie obtaining in the culture of antiblackness.”52 Wilderson might consider brown people “junior partners” of whiteness.53 Popular discourse echoes this sentiment, labeling brown identities as “honorary whites,” “white-adjacent,” or “whiteness with a tan.” Given its ontological and political indeterminacy, Ren Ellis Neyra provocatively asks, “What is brownness’s ethics?”54 In what proceeds, we argue that not only does Amer have comedic bits that exemplify brown interontology, but he also recovers its potential ethics.

Being Down

While Vagabond reveals how brown interontology can foster survival strategies, the Netflix series Mo (in which Amer metacinematically plays the titular character Mo Najjar) turns inward, foregrounding the dual sense of “being down” that structures brown life. On one register, being down signals Mo’s depressive position—his struggles with displacement, loss, and the psychic weight of statelessness. On another, it marks the ethical labor of being down for others: a solidarity that emerges from shared precarity. The series explores what happens when brownness confronts itself—when the misreadings imposed from above give way to the intimate negotiations of difference, care, contradiction, and allegiance among brown communities. In these moments, Mo shows that being down is both an affective condition and a political orientation, revealing how brown people navigate the heavy feelings of diasporic life while forging bonds that refuse the isolating logics of empire. Through the recurring romance with Maria, a Mexican American woman, and Mo’s detour to Mexico as a stateless refugee, Mo interrogates the interior life of brownness not only as a category imposed from above but as a space where love, friction, and kinship emerge from within.

In the pilot episode titled “Hamoodi,” brown interontology is first signaled in an interaction Mo has with his coworker at a phone store in Houston.55 When asked in Spanish where the phone cases are located, Mo responds in fluent Spanglish, pointing out the cases next to those with the image of Selena. He follows this with a reverent “rest in peace,” makes the sign of the cross, and looks upward—a syncretic gesture that blends Muslim and Catholic sensibilities. This exchange isn’t merely comedic banter; it stages the casual, embodied knowledge of living in a borderland of interontology, where cultural references represent brownness across ethnic specificities and devotional signs are playfully shared. The show then delves into Mo’s painfully estranged relationship with Maria, as a central site of being down; as Mo’s depression mounts, so do his reveries about reconciliations of brown difference and even similarities between Arab and Latino culture. These daydreams humorously stage theological and cultural differences. Maria defends her Catholicism after Mo’s mother accuses her of “worshipping three gods,” and while talking about the future of their relationship, Amer jokes that before discussing hijabs, they should first “cut out pork.” Maria’s defiant “no, pastor,” in response, marks both the boundaries of cultural negotiation and the elasticity of their bond. Mo’s comment that “nuns wear hijabs . . . the original hijab” cleverly reframes Catholic tradition through an Islamic lens. These intimate moments gesture toward what Muñoz describes as a brown recognition that “flickers between minoritarian subjects.” In some cases, he argues, “aesthetic practices and performances offer a particular theoretical lens to understand the ways in which different circuits of belonging connect.”56

As the series progresses, Mo’s refugee status and lack of documentation amplify his interstitial existence. He remains suspended between identities—too brown for whiteness and too ethnically ambiguous for easy categorization. In the episode “Moola,” Maria questions why Mo won’t marry her to secure citizenship.57 He deflects with humor, joking about Arab influences on Latin culture: “If we did a cheek swab on you, it’d probably come up 30 percent Arab . . . Burrito, shawarma, pita bread, tortilla. Both flat, delicious, puffy.” Mo shows that brown interontology is lived rather than theoretical, expressed through shared histories of language, cuisine, migration, and affection, marked by colonial conquest and displacement. The season culminates poetically, with Mo and Maria imagining a future together in an olive field—a big house filled with children and extended family.58 Mo quietly promises, “Until I buy my own piece of land,” a line evoking agrarian dreams common among displaced peoples. Here, land is not simply property; it is a surrogate homeland, symbolizing self-determination in the face of imperial uprooting. As Mexican banda music plays and the couple dances into the sunset, the series presents a vision of brown intimacy forged by exile, longing, and the hope of belonging.

Yet Mo does not romanticize brown solidarity; it exposes its fragilities as well. Nowhere is this clearer than in “Remorse,” where the show foregrounds the class hierarchies structuring brown relationships.59 Maria pitches an investment opportunity to her Indian American friend and the friend’s wealthy white husband—an informal proposal to expand her car-garage business made just before a lavish party to which she was previously invited. The couple initially agrees to “help,” framing the investment as support between friends, but once their financial involvement is secured, the friend’s demeanor shifts. She begins treating Maria not as a peer or partner but as subordinate labor, subtly enforcing a hierarchy that mirrors employer–domestic worker relations. The tension escalates until Maria calls her out, and the ensuing argument shatters the veneer of shared experience. The scene reveals how entrenched class hierarchies and colonial legacies shape relationships within diasporic brown communities. Though Maria and her friend share a similar racialization under the white gaze, they do so from vastly different socioeconomic positions. Maria, a working-class Mexican American woman building generational wealth through entrepreneurial labor, enters the party seeking inclusion, only to find that capital—not shared brownness—determines belonging. Her friend, aligned with wealth and whiteness through marriage and status, asserts class power through subtle condescension. What unfolds is not merely interpersonal tension but a demonstration of how brownness’s interontology is mediated by class dominance. This moment troubles any romantic notion of a “brown commons,” echoing Muñoz’s reminder that the commons “is not made by the performance.”60 Shared ethnicity or conviviality cannot create it; it must be continually negotiated and is often foreclosed by economic asymmetry.

Season two of Mo picks up after the cliffhanger of the previous season’s finale.61 While chasing down the thieves who stole olive trees from the field where he works, Mo and his best friend, Nick, accidentally get locked inside the truck transporting the trees. The truck crosses the border, and Mo, still undocumented, finds himself stranded in Mexico. In a Kafkaesque moment at the Mexican consulate, he is denied reentry into the United States and told, “You’re Mexican now,” a surreal declaration that literalizes his interontological drift. Settling into life in Mexico, Mo sells falafel tacos and performs as El Oso Palestino, a lucha libre wrestler whose improvisational survival strategies parody the commodification of displacement within popular culture. Despite its humor, this episode offers the season’s sharpest illustration of the limits of interontology’s ethical potential under neoliberal and settler colonial regimes. Mo is invited to a party hosted by the wife of the US ambassador to Mexico, who, attracted by his wrestling performance, solicits him sexually. The ambassador, openly permissive of the encounter, offers to help Mo obtain documentation, emphasizing that the offer is not a quid pro quo for sexual favors. Yet after this arrangement is proposed, the conversation turns to Palestine. When Mo corrects the ambassador’s description of Israel–Palestine as a “conflict,” insisting instead that it is an “occupation,” the offer is abruptly withdrawn. The moment exposes the moral bankruptcy of white liberalism, which conditions aid on ideological compliance and refuses to acknowledge Palestinian claims to land, dispossession, and ongoing occupation. Additionally, this reversal exposes what Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita identify as the moral asymmetry of liberal imperial power, which legitimizes itself through law and diplomacy while continuing to “produce new violence . . . to ensure the maintenance, spread, and permanence of the colonial authority.”62 Aid is extended only insofar as its recipients do not challenge the geopolitical narratives that naturalize dispossession. Mo’s refusal is therefore not merely personal; it is a refusal to participate in what Sánchez and Pita describe as the state’s production of “preferential identity” and differential humanity.63

Interontology here meets its limit: brownness may circulate across borders, but the political truth about settler colonialism—especially its Palestinian truth—remains punishable. This episode delicately stages the danger Sánchez and Pita warn against, the collapsing of distinct histories of dispossession into a single register of colonial equivalence. While analogies between Palestine and the US–Mexico border can be politically galvanizing, Sánchez and Pita caution that revealing parallels aside such comparisons risks obscuring the fact that these are “barriers of different orders” produced by different imperial formations.64 Mo’s sudden reclassification as “Mexican” earlier in the episode does not signal Indigeneity or settler belonging but instead exposes the administrative fungibility of brownness under contemporary regimes of migration, where racialized bodies are reassigned across borders while remaining structurally disposable. By the end of the season, Mo has moved beyond the survivalist mimicry of “Hector” that he cultivates in Vagabond. His story reframes brownness not as a fixed category but as a relational force, an evolving ethic of refusal and imagination despite the violent necropolitical machinations of empire.

As Amer’s comedy dramatizes the interontological superimposition of brownness—its ambiguity, its strategic uses, and its vulnerability to imperial violence—it highlights the necessity for it to engage with its positioning in (ethical) relation to (and even overlap with) Blackness. Erica R. Edwards explains that “September 11 intensified categories of racialization while recalibrating racial hierarchy to incorporate the production of the ‘Arab-Middle Eastern-Muslim’ into preexisting codes determining the distinction between livable life and disposable life. That is, 9/11 magnified how the consolidation of carceral and military power both exported the technologies of surveillance and capture that have historically played out on the domestic field of anti-Blackness and ‘brought home’ the racialized figure of the Muslim enemy.”65 Amer’s series stages precisely this entanglement through Mo’s friendship with Nick, a Black man who operates not just as comic foil but as ethical compass, spiritual interlocutor, and stand-in for a longer Black radical tradition that hovers beneath the surface of the show’s narrative world. Their relationship is not merely symbolic or a lazy animation of the hackneyed “magical negro” trope; it stages the tensions and potentialities of the Black-brown interface in the context of US racial capitalism.66 In multiple episodes, Nick is Mo’s companion in both failure and fantasy. They hang out at convenience stores, engage in side hustles, argue over moral decisions, and reflect on their shared entrapment within the carceral and economic systems of the United States. Early in the series, while at brunch, Mo’s friend recounts the emotional convergence of their lives: “His dad died around the same time my pops went to jail. And we got tattoos of our dads’ names.”67 This moment is not simply about shared grief; it clarifies the double sense of being down that structures the show. On one level, both men are down, weighed by depression, loss, and the psychic aftershocks of premature death and incarceration. On another, they are down for each other, bound by a solidarity forged through parallel encounters with state violence. The scene shows how Black and brown men in the United States are sutured together not through essentialized identities but through the shared experience of policing, prisons, and generational dispossession. In Mo, brownness takes shape precisely within this dual register: as an affective heaviness that marks life under racial capitalism and as an ethical orientation toward others who carry similar weight.

Later in the series, they host the zaffa for Mo’s friend, Hameed, at Nick’s barbershop.68 In this scene—where Mo and his friends stage a traditional Palestinian wedding celebration inside a Black barbershop—Arab and African American cultural worlds converge in a charged space of improvisational celebration. The scene could easily slip into a liberal fantasy of multicultural harmony, but instead, it vibrates with a messier, more grounded sense of community. The Palestinian drummers don’t perform for the barbershop, they merge with it. The barbers, customers, and musicians create a collective beat that blurs cultural ownership. There is no spectacle of difference, no attempt at translating one tradition into another. Rather, the shared physical space—a barbershop, historically a central node in Black communal life—is momentarily reconstituted as a zone of interontological methexis: a commons made not by intention but by practice. As Muñoz writes, methexis is “a moment in which partition between the performance and the audience lifts,” allowing for “a kind of commons [to come] into view that is not made by the performance.”69 The barbershop zaffa is precisely this kind of moment, a fleeting glimpse of what a shared racial world might look like, not through the erasure of difference but through its improvisational layering.

But it is in the dream sequence during Mo’s incarceration by ICE that the relationship between brownness and Blackness illuminates the ethical potential of brown interontology and points toward a shared condition of racial precarity.70 In a dream—shaped by the trauma of incarceration at an ICE facility—Mo is visited by Nick, who refers to him as “a man with no right of return,” referring to the Palestinian refugees who, according to Israel, don’t have any right to ever return to their land where they have been displaced by the occupation. Mo protests, “I didn’t choose to be stateless,” to which Nick, now a spectral figure, replies that there will “always be another wall.” Their exchange is haunting not just for its allusions to occupation, exile, and carcerality but for the ease with which Nick shifts from friend to ancestral guide. He morphs into Mo’s grandfather and hands him the key to his Palestine home, calling him “Hamoodi” and urging him to dig his way out of jail. By the time Mo escapes detention with the key in hand—a symbol passed to him by a Black friend/grandfather hybrid—the message is clear: Brown interontology isn’t about sameness but about surviving in difference together. Mo’s relationship with Nick stands as a rejoinder to liberal calls for alliance and a challenge to the idea that solidarity must be grounded in recognition, sameness, or equivalence. Their bond instead arises from the shared condition of being down—down as in carrying the weight of depression, dispossession, and state violence and down as in committed to each other in the struggle to survive those conditions. Solidarity here does not announce itself through grand declarations; it flickers in the interstices, in the surreal dream sequence where Nick appears as both friend and ancestor, in the barbershop drumbeat that merges Black and Palestinian rhythms, and in the mundane flow of brown and Black life under empire. In these scenes, being down names both the affective gravity that structures their worlds and the ethical willingness to shoulder that gravity together.

The season two finale of Mo, “A Call from God,” crystallizes how brown interontology might be understood as the precondition for political imagining otherwise by staging Mo’s long-awaited return to the West Bank as both a narrative culmination and a confrontation with global architectures of control.71 Mo’s journey—from his perilous crossing of the US–Mexico border to the militarized walls of Israeli occupation—reveals how people are, as Muñoz argues, “rendered brown” by their “personal and familial participations in South-to-North migration patterns . . . by way of accents and linguistic orientations that convey a certain difference . . . by the ways in which one’s spatial coordinates are contested, and the ways in which one’s right to residency is challenged by those who make false claims to nativity.”72 This is being brown: an interontological positioning shaped by the insistence that certain subjects remain perpetually out of place, with no singular (identitarian) belonging. Yet the season finale also illuminates what it means to be down: the ethical potential activated when those marked by such conditions attune themselves to one another’s struggles, transforming parallel injuries into the grounds for political possibility. The brown commons has long been visible—when Palestinians in Gaza tweeted survival tactics to Black protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, when Colombians marched with Palestinian flags, or as Palestinians recently created digital photo elegies with Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s viral song, “DtMF” (“Debí Tirar Más Fotos” / “I Should Have Taken More Photos”).73 In these instances, the ethical potential of brownness arises not despite its ambiguity but through it, as strategic, temporary unities that do not erase difference but convert it into the basis for a radical relationality. In Mo, the visual symmetry between border walls represents brown interontology, while the Najjar family’s homecoming reframes the precarity of its condition as a brown communal dream of a world after walls.

Rebecca Kumar is assistant professor in the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing at Spelman College. She specializes in cinema and visual culture with an emphasis on global queer and feminist film. She also has scholarly interests in comparative ethnic studies, particularly Afro-Asian relations, and the emerging field of critical brown studies. Kumar’s published work appears in Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War Literature, Film, and Art; Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies; The Scholar and Feminist Online; liquid blackness; Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media; and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race. She is coeditor, with Seulghee Lee, of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture. She is currently working on a series of essays on constructions of brownness since 9/11.

Fernando Esquivel-Suarez is assistant professor of ethnic studies in the Department of Literature, Media, and Writing at Spelman College and a former fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University and the National Humanities Center. His research examines the racial and cultural implications of the war on drugs through an interdisciplinary lens that bridges cultural studies, history, and digital humanities, with particular attention to narcotrafficking narratives, racialized criminalization, and representations of masculinity in popular culture. He is currently completing The Pablo Escobar Mixtape, a book that traces Escobar’s transformation into a cultural and hip-hop icon within the neoliberal landscape of the 1990s.

Notes

1. 1. Pushpek Sidhu, “South Asians 🫱🏽‍🫲🏼 Latinos,” March 21, 2023, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cW_RYXhLws.

2. 2. Pushpek Sidhu (@pushpeksidhu_), “☠️☠️☠️,” Instagram, March 23, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/reel/CqJtB7qDuVI/.

3. 3. René Vaca (@too.funny.comedy), “Is this Mexican 🇲🇽 or Indian 🇮🇳!?,” Instagram, January 16, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/reels/Cne1kIChw3q/; Shaan Joshi (@shaan.joshi), “Hate smoking with hippies,” Instagram, June 30, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca54TnmjN-t/; Asif Ali (@alicomedy), “Shoutouts to all the undercover agents out there lol,” Instagram, April 26, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cc0woLWMD2G/.

4. 4. Stan Lathan, dir., Mo Amer: The Vagabond (Netflix, 2018); Mo Amer, creator, Mo, aired 2022–2025 on Netflix.

5. 5. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010).

6. 6. Erica R. Edwards, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire (New York University Press, 2021), 75.

7. 7. Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review 49, no. 5 (2002): 1576–84.

8. 8. Chad Shomura, “‘These Are Bad People’: Enemy Combatants and the Homopolitics of the ‘War on Terror,’” Theory & Event 13, no. 1 (2010): https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tae.0.0114; Christopher Rivera, “The Brown Threat: Post-9/11 Conflations of Latina/os and Middle Eastern Muslims in the U.S. American Imagination,” Latino Studies 12, no. 1 (2014): 44–64.

9. 9. Vijay Prashad, Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (New Press, 2012), 6.

10. 10. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxi.

11. 11. Byrd, Transit of Empire, xxi.

12. 12. Kumarini Silva, Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 29; Donald J. Trump, “Remarks Announcing Candidacy for President in New York City,” American Presidency Project, June 16, 2015, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-announcing-candidacy-for-president-new-york-city.

13. 13. Nitasha Tamar Sharma, “Brown,” in Keywords for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Võ, and K. Scott Wong (New York University Press, 2015), 19. Sharma’s essay engages the question of brownness in relation to the construction of Asian Americans as yellow.

14. 14. Sharma, “Brown,” 19.

15. 15. José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020).

16. 16. José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31, no. 3 (2006): 669.

17. 17. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 676.

18. 18. Muñoz, 676.

19. 19. Klein cited in Muñoz, 676.

20. 20. Muñoz, The Sense of Brown; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010); Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican, 2018).

21. 21. Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, 133, 138.

22. 22. Christopher B. Patterson, “Brown Theory: A Storied Manifest of Our World,” Positions: Asia Critique 31, no. 1 (2023): 104. In his triptych brown theory, Patterson’s final “shades of brown” approximates what we’re calling interontology but still rests on the level of affect or performance.

23. 23. Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, preface to Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, xxiii, 2.

24. 24. Patterson, “Brown Theory,” 104; Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, 2.

25. 25. Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (University of Illinois Press, 2020), 6.

26. 26. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution,” in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (Routledge, 1990).

27. 27. Spivak, “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution,” 184.

28. 28. Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, 149.

29. 29. Gilberto Rosas, “The Managed Violences of the Borderlands: Treacherous Geographies, Policeability, and the ‘Unremarkable’ Suspect,” Latino Studies 14, no. 3 (2016): 346.

30. 30. Amer is likely referring to Timothy McVeigh, a white male American domestic terrorist who masterminded and perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, killing 167 people, injuring 684 people, and destroying one-third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

31. 31. Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, 130.

32. 32. See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White—The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Basic Books, 2018); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Beacon Press, 2022).

33. 33. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994), 57.

34. 34. Morgan, Laughing to Keep from Dying, 5.

35. 35. Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 39.

36. 36. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6.

37. 37. Sumita Chakraborty, “Brownness and the Ontology of Analogy,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10, no. 1 (2024): 188.

38. 38. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 2000). See Elizabeth Prine Pauls, “Tribal Nomenclature: American Indian, Native American, and First Nation,” Britannica, last updated June 30, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tribal-Nomenclature-American-Indian-Native-American-and-First-Nation-1386025.

39. 39. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 15.

40. 40. Rivera, “Brown Threat,” 48.

41. 41. Alicia Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2006), 2. 

42. 42. Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (University of Texas Press, 2011), 133. As Magali M. Carrera demonstrates in Imagining Identity in New Spain, the casta system was not merely a descriptive taxonomy of mixture but a visual, juridical, and epistemic regime that sought to stabilize and naturalize colonial hierarchies. Through paintings, legal categories, and bureaucratic recordkeeping, colonial authorities rendered mixed bodies legible as governable subjects, using phenotypic gradations to assign moral value, social rank, and political consequence. By making the mixed body “knowable” through an elaborate grid of racial classifications, the casta system transformed fluid social relations into fixed hierarchies, producing what Carrera identifies as a “colonial taxonomy of difference” that disciplined both identity and mobility (133). This regulatory apparatus of visuality and classification underscores how mestizaje, far from a harmonious fusion, operated as a technique of social control designed to secure colonial power.

43. 43. José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997).

44. 44. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 2012).

45. 45. Ed Morales, Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture (Verso, 2018).

46. 46. Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (Pluto Press, 2010).

47. 47. Elizabeth I, “Licensing Casper van Senden to Deport Negroes [Draft],” ca. January 1601, in Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 3, The Later Tudors (1588–1603), ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (Yale University Press, 1969), 221–22.

48. 48. Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

49. 49. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor, 3–5.

50. 50. Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

51. 51. Patterson, “Brown Theory,” 93.

52. 52. Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 55.

53. 53. Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 43.

54. 54. Ren Ellis Neyra, “The Question of Ethics in the Semiotics of Brownness,” sx salon, October 2020, http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/question-ethics-semiotics-brownness.

55. 55. Amer, Mo, season 1, episode 1, “Hamoodi,” directed by Solvan Naim, aired August 24, 2022, on Netflix.

56. 56. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 680.

57. 57. Amer, Mo, season 1, episode 4, “Moola,” directed by Solvan Naim, aired August 24, 2022, on Netflix.

58. 58. Amer, Mo, season 1, episode 8, “Vamos,” directed by Solvan Naim, aired August 24, 2022, on Netflix. 

59. 59. Amer, Mo, season 1, episode 3, “Remorse,” directed by Solvan Naim, aired August 24, 2022, on Netflix.

60. 60. Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, 130.

61. 61. Amer, Mo, season 2, episode 1, “Oso Palestino (The Palestinian Bear),” directed by Mohammed Amer, aired January 30, 2025, on Netflix. 

62. 62. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, “Rethinking Settler Colonialism,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 1043.

63. 63. Sánchez and Pita, “Rethinking Settler Colonialism,” 1043.

64. 64. Sánchez and Pita, 1039.

65. 65. Erica R. Edwards, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire (New York University Press, 2021), 75.

66. 66. D. Marvin Jones, Race, Sex, and Suspicion: The Myth of the Black Male (Praeger, 2005), 35.

67. 67. Amer, Mo, season 2, episode 2, “Gone Fishing,” directed by Solvan Naim, aired January 30, 2025, on Netflix.

68. 68. Amer, Mo, season 1, episode 6, “Holy Matrimony,” directed by Solvan Naim, aired August 24, 2022, on Netflix.

69. 69. Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, 130.

70. 70. Amer, Mo, season 2, episode 2, “Gone Fishing,” directed by Solvan Naim, aired January 30, 2025, on Netflix.

71. 71. Amer, Mo, season 2, episode 8, “A Call from God,” directed by Mohammed Amer, aired January 30, 2025, on Netflix.

72. 72. Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, 3.

73. 73. Imani Jackson, “How Palestinian Protesters Helped Black Lives Matter,” USA Today, July 1, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/spotlight/2016/07/01/how-palestinian-protesters-helped-black-lives-matter/85160266/; Prishita Maheshwari-Aplin, “From Colombia to Palestine: Solidarity Knows No Borders,” BRICKS Magazine, May 16, 2021, https://bricksmagazine.co.uk/2021/05/16/from-colombia-to-palestine-solidarity-knows-no-borders/; “Bad Bunny Celebrates Palestinian Listeners Embracing His Music,” Arab News, October 3, 2025, https://www.arabnews.com/node/2617658/lifestyle.