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Skin-bleachers are as bigoted as the BNP
SourceI used to stare at them in awe, the other teenage Asian girls, in their satin churidar pyjamas, jewelled mules and thick black kohl, gossiping in Punjabi. They exuded an urban sophistication far greater than I — an Essex girl able to speak only English and possessed of one unexciting gingham suit — could ever muster.
But the flamboyant exoticism wasn’t the main thing that unnerved me about the daughters of Indian immigrants in 1980s London. It was the colour of their skin — or lack of it. Often, the faces of these teenagers looked preternaturally pale, especially when set against the blackness of their eyes and the redness of their lips. Sometimes their ashen complexions were uneven, like differing shades of snow when it has been trampled underfoot. It was only years later that I learnt that their pallor came from a jar, invariably one spiked with a bleaching agent.
Until recently, I thought that the trend for Asian women to whiten their skin was tucked safely away in the past, like ra-ra skirts and the National Front. Not so. A BBC investigation showed last night that brown women up and down the land still feel the pressure to be pale.
Despite a longstanding ban on the most damaging ingredients, contraband creams are still in circulation in Britain. The documentary, fronted by the light-skinned Anita Rani, found that women continue to use them despite the health risks: skin thinning, weight gain and hormonal disorders due to steroids, kidney and nerve damage through the use of mercury, and an elevated risk of cancer thanks to the use of a known carcinogen called hydroquinone.
<!--#include file="m63-article-related-attachements.html"--> Why on earth do these women want to scrub off such an integral part of their identity, even risking illness to do so? It’s not because they want to pass themselves off as Englishwomen; they often wear saris and salwar kameezes and follow traditional customs. The strange truth is that, among Asians, skin colour matters. I can’t tell you why because I’ve never understood it, but fairness really is a synonym for beauty. One (male) Indian blogger recently ridiculed his homeland’s colour obsession: “If a woman is fair-skinned she is automatically beautiful, no matter how many coats you could hang from her nose.”
You have only to check Asian marriage agencies for proof; mentions of GSOH are scant but skin colour is everywhere. One agency featured women selling themselves with gambits such as this: “I am 33, fair, never married . . .”; “5ft 3in, fair skin, hazel eyes . . .” One Gujarati family in search of a groom for their daughter proclaim her “whitish skin complexion”. As if it really, really matters — more than intelligence, more than kindness and more than a GSOH.
So prevalent is the belief that fair is good that it must be pretty much hardwired into the Asian psyche (and I do mean Asian in the widest sense of the word — Japanese women are among the world’s most enthusiastic users of skin whiteners). Perhaps it was once a sign of social class: only poor people needed to toil in the sun, so a dark, weatherbeaten face testified to a lowly station. Perhaps the belief hardened during India’s long, violent history, in which power and wealth were associated with fair-skinned marauders such as the Aryans.
Wherever it comes from, the wish to be white has spawned a large, anxiety-inducing industry. When I visited Ilford, East London, last week, many pharmacies were displaying huge advertisements for Lightenex, a £40 cream aimed at those who want “the perfect ivory complexion”. The pharmacist to whom I spoke refused to endorse it; the cream’s melanin-inhibiting ingredient, kojic acid, has been shown a yellow card by a European scientific committee, which concluded last year that the ingredient, a by-product of the fermentation process used to make saké, might cause skin complaints if used regularly.
This disturbing disaffection with natural skin colour has taken on the self-perpetuating nature of the size-zero debate. Just as girls want to be thin because everyone famous and successful seems to be thin, Asian girls want to be whiter because every glamorous and successful Asian woman is light-skinned. Shilpa Shetty, perhaps the best-known Bollywood actress in Britain, lies at the cappuccino end of the coffee-colour spectrum; espresso shades receive a relatively bitter reception (unless you are a man, in which case it’s the colour of your money that matters). Until this documentary, I never knew that the fair-skinned models in Asian fashion magazines are rarely Asian at all, but dark-haired Eastern Europeans.
When we spoke on the phone last week, Rani explained her mother’s preference for light skin like this: “She is what she is, this is the way she has been brought up. It doesn’t come from a place of prejudice; it comes from having been the fairest in her family and having been treated better because of it. She wanted to be a Bollywood actress, and everyone on TV and in Bollywood is fair. There’s nothing sinister about the way my mum is.”
But, really, there is something sinister about the Asian preoccupation with skin colour. Just because we can’t explain it, just because it is instinctive, just because our parents think it, doesn’t make it OK. That unquestioning attitude allows prejudice to flourish; if we simply assume that a light-skinned person has more worth than a dark-skinned person, if we buy into the myth that perfection is an ivory skin, then so will our daughters. The belief makes us as bigoted as the British National Party. In fact, even more so — at least the BNP hates the Poles as much as the Pakistanis. Theirs is an (almost) colour-blind, all-encompassing bigotry, which, in a perverse way, seems almost equitable by comparison.
Raising a hue and cry about colour prejudice in Asian communities is particularly important for a culture that reveres its elders. Often, older generations run the show (such as the Gujarati parents seeking their daughter’s partner) and archaic attitudes hang around for far longer than they should. Recently, a family acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen for years was admiring my two young children, whose complexions derive from a mixed Indian and Anglo-Saxon parentage. “Your daughter’s so dark and your son is so fair,” she exclaimed, without a shred of malice. “What a pity it isn’t the other way round.”
Pretty boring article to post, tbh, but I had to post it just to highlight the recent anti-BNP newspaper articles which have been coming left right and centre recently with nothing but unsubstantiated and pointless references to the BNP.
Skin bleachers = Bigoted BNP?????
Originally Posted by ikki
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