Brown or brown people is a racial and ethnic classification. Like black people and white people, it is a metaphor for race based on human skin colour. In racialist anthropology, the colour brown and the term brown people were used to describe a series of hypothesized racial groups that included various populations from North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, and South America. In Brazil, brown people is a cognate term for pardo.