Brown Girl in the Room is an all too realistic and relatable story of being a woman of colour and building your career. The events and themes in this story will likely feel familiar to anyone who’s dealt with office politics and difficult co-workers, and Ramsingh does a great job of depicting the insidiously subtle form racism can take in the professional world.
Sara Ramnarine is hired as a senior public relations officer for a community non-profit called Albatross. While her name is South Asian in origin, her parents immigrated to Canada from the Caribbean, and Sara herself grew up in Toronto and doesn’t herself have lived experience of being a newcomer to the country. Yet Albatross views her hiring as a highly political act, even though her bosses and co-workers won’t quite admit it. Her bosses are hopeful she will help the company build stronger relationships with the South Asian community they serve, and Sara has an uneasy feeling that their faith in her has less to do with her public relations abilities and more to do with the brownness of her skin. I love how subtle the wrongness in her environment is; Sara herself can’t pinpoint why some of the things they say make her uncomfortable, and often ends up questioning her own discomfort. Early in the novel, she talks about a ‘diversity’ question that came up in her interview, and how worried she is that Albatross expects her to speak a South Asian language, even though she is fluent only in English. Read more….