“I am not, in this instance, concerned with whiteness at all,” José Muñoz stated towards the beginning of his February 4th lecture. An associate professor at the Tisch School for the Arts at NYU, Muñoz is instead concerned with the notion of brownness, an identity he claims is rooted not in skin colour but in “feeling like a problem.”

Muñoz delivered his lecture, entitled “‘Chico, what does it feel like to be a problem?’: The Transmission of Brownness,” to a crowded room at the Munk Centre last Friday. Taking his provocative titular question from the work of early 20th century civil rights activist W.E.B DuBois, Muñoz sought to present two distinct historical experiences-black and Latino-as analogous, and hopes that his case study of the Latino experience will present a model that can be applied to other groups.

Muñoz used the examples of Jose Feliciano, a Puerto Rican-American musician, and the 1970s sitcom Chico and the Man to illustrate the discrimination and stereotyping of Latinos in American pop culture. Feliciano’s performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1968 World Series in Detroit was met with boos, and the network that ran the game’s broadcast was flooded with complaints about his plaintive rendition of the national anthem. In Chico and the Man, the title characters are two men from radically different cultural backgrounds who eventually grow to respect each other, despite the frequent and overtly racist jokes “The Man” makes to Chico, his Latino business partner who lives in a van in their auto garage.

Muñoz made a point of distiguishing between the two terms “Latino” and “Hispanic,” which are commonly used to describe people of Caribbean- and Latin-American descent. “Hispanic” is a term that came of age with the US census and is still used by the American government. Muñoz believes it is a term that conjures “low-income people who confront unusual employment” and prefers to use the label “Latino,” which has been taken up by more progressive members of the ethnic studies community.

Much has been written about the African-American experience to elicit the sympathy of the white majority, but Muñoz prefers to evoke intraracial empathy. “Brown feelings are the glue that cohere group identification.”