India Debates Skin-Tone Bias as Beauty Companies Alter Ads
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
How weasely of the NYT. Colorism exists all over the world and pre-dates British colonialism in India. (Although the British certainly leveraged that phenomenon in dividing and conquering the continent, just as it leveraged preexisting linguistic and religious differences.)
For clarity, I'm not claiming the British created colorism, my point is just that a century of rule by them will certainly have reinforced the link between light skin and high class.
Doesn't that suggest that the concept of distinguishing fair-skinned people?
> many markers of high class/status in India are inherited directly from their erstwhile British rulers: speaking "proper" English, dressing in formal Western clothing, etc. Why would skin color not be one?
Colorism existed all over the ancient world: https://quillette.com/2019/02/13/the-origins-of-colourism.
> Ancient Aztec codices in Central America revealed the use of cosmetics by women to attain a lighter skin, and paintings from ancient Egypt depicted women with lighter skin than males. In the Arab world, more broadly, one early traveller noted, “The highest praise is perhaps ‘She is white as snow.’” In North America, one Hopi chief commented, “We say that a woman with a dark skin may be half man.”
The precise origins of colorism in India aren't known (some sources document colorism as early as 1500 BCE), but it would be very odd if it wasn't introduced to India until European contact in the 1500s CE, given that it existed in myriad other places in antiquity.
And I'm still unclear on what, exactly, about that article was "weaselly".
> It is partly a product of colonial prejudices, and it has been exacerbated by caste, regional differences and Bollywood, the nation’s film industry, which has long promoted lighter-skinned heroes.
The article mentions "colonial prejudices" as the cause. It uses the caveat "partly" but doesn't mention any other origin, leaving the impression that colonialism created the prejudice, rather than reinforcing existing prejudices.
It's "weasely" because it whitewashes the history of racism in India, making it seem like something that is "the product" of colonial rule.
P.S: Japanese is far more similar to Indian languages than any of their supposedly 'close' Indo-European cousins.
> In Japan the preference for skin that is white and free of blemishes has been documented since at least the Heian period (794–1185), as in books like The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji.[1] There is an old proverb "white skin covers the seven flaws" (色の白いは七難隠す, iro no shiroi wa shichinan kakusu) which refers to a white-skinned woman being beautiful even if her features are not attractive.
Dissenting from the cliche of 'caste-cow-curry' as the 'core' culture of India, here's some inconvenient counterfactuals.
- Skin tone often varies more b/w North-South than within particular locations.
- Even within particular geographies, the large-scale migrations in light of the millennia of plunder of India, has resulted in admixtures of North-India population in the South. Kashmiri Hindus in particular are found in large numbers on the coast/north of Karnataka (the first president of Planned Parenthood for instance); there are other such groups in TN as well.
- Large numbers of Brahmins in South India are actually, shock, horror, both poor, and dark-skinned.
- The only 'fair' looking ones I've seen are within certain sub-groups within sub-groups of Tamil Brahmins who have explicit histories of migrations from N. India. Ditto with the 'Seths' and other migrant communities who've settled down in the south for many centuries.
- North-East India who populations have both E.Asian features (which in current zeitgeist is in greatly higher standing), and vastly lighter skin-tone, are neither rich, nor have 'elite' status considering their rather isolated histories.
The problem is that the skin color issues in India go much deeper. It is a form of racism that is overt and deeply held throughout their society. The level that skin color is focused on in India would shock the average westerner. From very young age, dark kids (specifically girls) are made fun of for their dark skin color but told of their beauty if they have light skin.
It's rare in the arranged marriage process that a man marries a girl of darker skin.
(Besides affirmative action programs) Nothing in the US is near as race focused as what I've seen and heard from Indians.
Not that we don't have our own widely held discrimination... maybe the most similar concept in the west is height (girls don't marry shorter guys, from young ages short guys are made fun of while tall are admired, big income boost for extra height, leaders tend to be tall, etc).
Likewise, in poorer SE Asian countries, having a tan means you have likely been working in a field all day, a lot of SE Asian people believe a tan makes you look poor.
They are both the same thing. People don't want to look poor and want to look higher up on the class system.
>Colorism, the bias against people of darker skin tones, has vexed India for a long time. It is partly a product of colonial prejudices, and it has been exacerbated by caste, regional differences and Bollywood, the nation’s film industry, which has long promoted lighter-skinned heroes.
>Ms. Narayan, who recently published a book on how women are treated in India, said Bollywood had contributed to these prejudices.
>"Every heroine and now heroes, too, are whitewashed," she said. “And the villains are dark.”
https://feminisminindia.com/2018/10/08/dear-tamil-cinema-let...
For context, the actor in question (Rajinikanth) is the largest star in Tamil cinema and the movie (Shivaji) was a mainstream blockbuster.
Similar bias exists with height in film. A short actor like Tom Cruise can fill an aspect ratio for film better than an awkward 6 foot something actor, and it is easy to make a short actor taller with an apple crate for certain shots, but the reverse isn’t quite so.
As for the height of actors, good directors and cinematographers know how to deal with them through the right kind of shots and angles, even without any assistance from CGI. The ones who struggle likely don’t have as much creativity or ability as we might tend to assume.
The movie industry aptly needs to take a big portion of the blame here by continuing to reinforce these stereotypes since a lot of Indians are attached to movies and tend to adapt what’s shown in movies into their own lives. But the governments over successive decades haven’t done anything on this, even though there are others laws against discrimination (against similar prejudices against certain sections of people who tend to have darker skin tones).
Past the rebranding, the system is fundamentally the same. We still live under racial capitalism (in which, as many a Marxist have noted, uneven development is a feature, not a bug), and the underlying conditions that cause people to go buy skin lightening creams remain unchanged.