In Search of a Better Definition of Bro

The lovely, earnest people at NPR’s Code Switch blog have attempted to map Bro Kingdom.

What up, bro? What’s good, brah? they ask, and then explain: “This is the chant of the bro, an equally parodied and celebrated genus of young men.” Their discussion arises from the cognitive dissonance engendered by the spectre of a non-white bro:

After a Code Switcher described a person of color as being a bro, some of us wondered whether the description even made sense. Uh, weren’t bros fratty white guys? Could dudes of color be bros independently of white bros? Or are they just like That Brown Friend in all those beer commercials — bro-y due to his social proximity to white bros?

Yes, the bro traditionally draws much of his strength from raced structures — the owner’s box, the frat. But bro-dom is also, as NPR’s self-admittedly overthought blog post insinuates, a fluid category, and one that quite a few of their readers identify as “knowing no creed or color.” I understand why many people take the other approach, identifying bros as an exclusively white group, but I’m not sure what is gained from doing so. Why double down on racial or any other divisions, particularly when the thing in question is the bro — an informal, inconsequential category that might as well unite multiple demographics around good humor, deliberate stupidity and a 30-rack of Bud Light?

Anyway, Code Switch identifies Matthew McConaughey, John Mayer, Dane Cook and Ryan Lochte as textbook examples, and settles on “four major dimensions of bro.”

These pillars, which may overlap, are stonerish-ness, dude-liness, preppiness, and jockishness. (Judging from our replies, bro-ishness seems to preclude any uncomplicated ease with sexual and gender fluidity, it seems.)

I would like to argue for a better, more expansive definition of bro — a definition organized around qualities that have less to do with traditional structures and race-specific activities and more to do with an intrinsic bro outlook on life. I have a lot of male friends who are total bros; some of them are gay or non-white, others are huge fans of Nashville or thoughtful readers of The Economist when they’re not broing out (i.e. doing nothing of consequence) on weekends, and they’re all delightful in a way that Ryan Lochte is not. One such friend suggested that being a bro is indulging in “unabashed fraternal camaraderie via a multitude of pursuits,” whatever those pursuits might be. “Bro-ness is the most natural of things,” said another close bro of mine, and I hope I’m not being flippant about stratification in America when I say that I agree.

Maybe this case calls for the famous obscenity criterion from Jacobellis vs. Ohio (1964). Perhaps, to paraphrase Supreme Court Judge Potter Stewart, we shall never succeed in intelligibly defining the materials embraced within this shorthand description — but I know a bro when I see him. Or her.