Wow, really enjoyed reading this thread,and agreed to most of it, so decided to open up an account. Been lurking on this website for about a year now and thought this would be the perfect time to open up and share my experience, so here it goes.
I'm also a brown skinned dude who lives away from my native country, my family and i moved to canada in 2006 and eversince then we have been living here.
I started here from middle school and right now am in 2nd year at the university of alberta. I honestly agree to a whole lot to what JackRobin said in his first post. But times have changed for me during my transition from grade school to university. First of all let me clear out that if i you dont see my skin color you wouldn't be able to differentiate me from a canadian white guy (accent, clothing, hairstyle etc). When I was in grade school pretty much all the girls i dated were white, and it was easier to get them. BUT now that i am university for the last 2 years, its A LOT harder to get laid, be it with a white girl or black (leaving brown out because of the following). I tried to figure out what might have been the problem and why this is happening.
The problem is my university (just like most unis i guess) is full of FOB brown people. no disrespect to any of those people, but the abundance of these brown people have made me "one of them". I am no longer " that only brown guy in the class" know what i mean? and as far as i know being a part of scarcity is always an asset.
My point for this post is, i always considered it an advantage for being brown(other than inside my uni), because i was the guy who was "different".
And to go back to the topic of the thread, i think guys should embrace their skin color and go with it, it has actually worked to an advantage for me than the other. sorry for the extra long post, just my thoughts, cheers.