The shades between grace and grotesque
At a very young age an unknown Indian aunty told my mom that I should start applying gram flour and turmeric daily. She said that’s what made Aishwarya Rai Bachchan fair and pretty. My ten-year-old mind couldn’t understand what was the connection between fairness and being beautiful then, but I do now.
Colorism, a term first coined in the 1983 by Alicia walker, is the prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their color.
Why would a race of individuals be prejudiced against their own, over something as trivial as having lesser or greater amounts of melanin?
Indians, as we know, did not discriminate on the basis of color, we were a combination of different cultures and races. Historically, there has been inclusion in varied skin colors, so it becomes important to understand how and when skin color become an important physical attribute. All Indian colonizers have one thing in common — their skin. Indians have been captured and conquered by white skinned colonies. It started with Aryans- the white skinned colonizers, attacking the dark-skinned Dravidians then followed by The Persians, The Portuguese, The Mughals and then lastly The British. The conflict may have started with its roots in colorism but soon they turned to be more about territory, money and power, rather than race and color. Britishers then claimed to be superior, more intelligent, who were born to rule the inferior, i.e. the dark-skinned Indians.
After being ruled by white colonies for over three hundred fifty years, the common man began associating white colored skin with the ruling class, with power, with desirability, and also ultimately, with beauty. Unknowingly, it became a practice of attaching the greater societal superiority and power to the fairer skin males and females, which in turn dictated and shaped the desire for a westernized concept of beauty with lighter skin — even after so many years of independence.
Class and caste if not directly are still related to color. As we know an upper caste woman or man is more socially acceptable than the lower caste counterpart; however, within the same case, men and women with lighter skin are almost always preferred to those with darker skin. Throughout India, one can find individuals with varied degrees of skin tone in each of the different caste groups. However, skin color is more location specific than caste specific for example : Kashmiris/north Indians are considered fairer to South Indians. Skin color is now also intertwined with financial status and class.
In a series of surveys and interviews conducted by Washington University Global Studies Law Review. , when woman were asked to describe what did they mean while using the adjective ‘pretty’ , approximately 64% women, out of which many were dark toned, used the word “fair” or “light” as the main attributes. It was evident from the study that dark skinned people, both males and females, aspired to have a lighter skin tone than their own color. While the genesis of this prejudice might be colonization, it is now widely fostered by the media. Media portrays beauty to be fair. I grew up watching commercials where dark skin individuals lead a dull, lonely and miserable life UNTIL they found a fairness lotion. India is one of the largest markets for fairness creams. As of 2019 fairness cream market was worth 3000 crore and this is expected to grow to 5000 till 2023. If a cream does not list skin lighting in it, it won’t sell. Fairness is equated to beauty and fairness creams are considered the tool to achieve that.
Even in the film industry, the fair skinned actors are seen playing the lead roles while their dark-skinned colleagues were their sidekicks or antagonists. All of our billboards, advertisements, movies, television are reserved for fair skinned women, so much so that dark skinned roles are charted by them. The media’s obsession with using fair skinned images greatly influences the general population to look like these lighter skinned models, and therefore use every means to “become beautiful” by using these fairness products.
The general population identifies beauty based on the standards set by these media moguls and while media might not be the cause of it ,it is to be blamed for converting colorism into this multimillion monster. The pervasiveness of color discrimination is evident. This implicit biasness is so deeply engraved in our psyche by media images, that it affects children, genders and classes alike.
•A 5-year-old Tamil girl believes that her sister is more beautiful than her because she is fair.
•A 12-year-old preteen using all sorts of filters and editing apps to make herself look fairer.
•An 18-year-old teen is reminded of her dark skin everyday by her bullies as she awaits the day when her mom allows her to use skin lighting treatments.
•A 25-year-old young woman is visiting cosmetic clinics every day for her treatments, because her education is futile if she is dark skinned.
•A 40-year-old woman applying yellow pastes all over her daughter’s face hoping and praying that her skin turns into a lighter shade.
•A 60 year old woman praying for a fair daughter in law because she wants light toned grandchildren.
When I hear these stories, I see myself. We all have been there at some point of time, haven’t we? We live in a generation where beauty standards are so high that it has become nearly impossible for all of us to be comfortable in our own skin.
Our heart knows that Colorism exists, that these stories have been buried deep in this era of ‘fairness’, but our head denies it. It denies it because no one wants to feel insecure, and thus taking the easy way out of the problem, i.e. ignoring it. No one wants to acknowledge the issue, speak about it openly, or accept it publicly. But I hope that as you reach the end of this article, a little part of you wants to listen to your heart and that you have faith that this is nothing but a concept that has been ingrained in the mind of a common man through generations of colonization and deepened through the fair skinned images all around via the growth of media and popular culture.
So here I say:
Yes I took the brown paper bag test and Yes I failed
Love,
KB
