At a time when disinformation, hate crimes, inequality, racial injustice, and white supremacy are on the rise, Brown Enough, part memoir and part social commentary, emerges, asking readers to proudly put their bodies, their identities, into the conversations of race. Brown Enough is a roller coaster of finding one’s true self while simultaneously having a racial awakening amidst the struggle to be “perfectly” Latinx, woke, and as Brown as possible to make it in today’s America.

Brown Enough opens with a moment that forever changed Christopher Rivas’s life, the night Ta-Nehisi Coates shared, in an intimate gathering in downtown L.A., the Brown man’s role in the race conversation.

“All I hear is black and white. As a Brown man, a Latin man, where does that leave me?” Coates took a short breath and responded, “Not in it.”

Like a reprimanded child, Rivas took his seat and remained silent for much of the event. But the effects didn’t end there. This conversation pushed Rivas to contemplate and rethink how whiteness and Blackness had impacted his sense of self and worth.

“Why is Brown not in it?” became the unspoken question for the rest of his life and a thread moving through this collection. Eventually, in every conversation, during every date, at every job, Rivas began to ask, “What are the consequences of not being in the conversation?” “What does it take to be in it?”
Brown Enough is the quest to find an answer.