Author: diva d

What color is beauty?
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What color is beauty?

Growing up as an Indian girl, it is inevitable to hear comments regarding your skin color. I constantly heard comments like “Don’t go out in the sun; you will get darker” or “You were much lighter as a child”. These comments never really bothered me because I was content with myself. Most times, it felt like they wanted me to feel upset about being darker-skinned and see that as a minus.

I can’t blame them because these are values that are instilled in Indian society, and I’m positive the same people grew up hearing the same comments. Colorism is extremely complicated in Indian households because it often isn’t from malicious intent; they truly think they are trying to help with these comments, which makes the situation more heartbreaking. It’s very sad to see that they think these types of comments are supposed to help them. These harmful ideologies are so incredibly normalized.

India has a huge colorism problem. One of India’s most popular moisturizers was called Fair and Lovely, and it was meant to make your skin lighter. Lighter skin is seen as more beautiful while darker skin is seen as ugly. This is due to darker skin being often associated with the lower class, caste, and poverty.

This ideology is not only prevalent in families and in business but also in the Indian movie industry. The majority of actresses in Indian movies are light-skinned and don’t reflect what the majority of Indian women look like. An example of this that is absolutely bizarre is when I learned about a British white actress who played many roles as an Indian woman. I was shocked when I first learned about that because it was insane that a white woman was cosplaying as an Indian woman. It was setting up standards for the audience that are unrealistic and overall disgusting.

History also plays a role in this harmful ideology. Colonialism had a huge impact because it reinforced racial hierarchy where whiteness is at the top and is seen as the standard. Whiteness is also associated with power and wealth.

This topic reminds me of when we listened to The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and when she talks about how a limited narrative shapes how we view and understand the world and people. This applies to viewpoints on colorism and how a single view impacts others and how we view ourselves.

The single story in this situation is that lighter skin is more beautiful than darker skin. This single story has been repeated and continued within families, media, and movies, and it has shaped a society that looks down on dark skin and caused dark skinned people to find fault in themselves

Colorism is an extremely complicated topic that not only exists within the South Asian community but also among other ethnic groups. I believe that addressing this harmful ideology is the beginning of making sure this single story is no longer spread.

Source for image : https://wamu.org/story/20/07/09/black-lives-matter-gets-indians-talking-about-skin-lightening-and-colorism/

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Apparently, I was a racist at Three.

Okay, I might’ve exaggerated the title a bit, but I was saying some pretty controversial things for a three-year-old.

When I first started my education journey at the age of 3, apparently I was scared of the other children in my class because they weren’t Indian. 

Just typing that sentence makes me feel foolish because I can’t even imagine myself feeling that way. But unfortunately, that is the truth. After my first day at Montessori school, the first thing I said to my dad was, “Pappa, I don’t want to go back to school; everyone doesn’t look like us and I’m scared.” I promise I wasn’t a bigot; I was just an unaware 3-year-old.  

For some context, until that moment I was mostly surrounded by South Asian faces, because I lived in India. But when we moved to New York, my parents decided to put me in Montessori school, and that was my first interaction with American society, so seeing people with different faces that weren’t Indian caught me off guard. If I’m being honest, I don’t even remember feeling this way because I have no memory of it. That’s why whenever my parents would bring this up to joke around, I was always confused as to why I must’ve felt scared. 

After learning about the idea of phenomenology, I realized that my experience connects to this concept. Phenomenology focuses on how people’s experiences and the way they interact & interpret the world are based on their own lived perspectives. At that age, my understanding of race was very limited and mainly focused on my lived experiences, which consisted of living in India with my grandparents, walking around the neighborhood, and talking to our neighbors. My world was overwhelmingly Indian; my knowledge of the rest of the world was incredibly limited. 

This experience also relates to the concept of Race and the Visible. Race is a visible feature, but the meaning we give race is through humans and their lived experiences. At the age of three, seeing people who looked different from what I was used to, and because it was a completely new experience, it led to me being scared because everything was unfamiliar.

This makes me reflect and think that race is something that is given meaning through humans; it’s just a visible trait, just like our hair, nose, and lips. My experience in school at first, might’ve felt like a major difference to me but over time it became normal. Even though it sounds corny, at the end of the day, we are all human, and we have more similarities than differences, so the few things that are different about us should be celebrated, and everyone’s lived experiences should be valued.