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by Divinder Purewal
Mirror, mirror on the wall
who’s the fairest of them all??
I am a dark-skinned Indian guy. You can see that in my photo in the right hand corner. My Dad is dark and I guess his dad was dark, too. Now, as a dark-skinned dude I have always been confused by the apparent obsession some of our community has with the desire to be light. I say confused because I spent much of my childhood in England surrounded by racists who would spend two-thirds of the year physically and verbally abusing me for the colour of my skin and the other one-third sun-bathing and trying to look as dark as me! So you can imagine my muddled state when as a teenager I was told by “well meaning” relatives that it would be hard to find a bride looking for a dark husband like me.
Can we rewind a little?
“A dark husband.” Hold on. Last time I checked, the majority of Indian people were dark. With the exception of the likes of Aishwarya Rai and her peers in the Bollywood movie industry (let me take this opportunity to say that I have been to India four times and have yet to see anyone that looks even remotely like Ms Rai!), most people from India are not that fair-skinned.
Yet the Indian beauty market is forever pushing the myth that “white is right.” The advertisers sell the idea that by miraculously changing the colour of your skin you can suddenly live the life of a Bollywood superstar.
“Wonder Bread complexion”
Large multi-nationals have managed to convince many of the affluent middle classes that being dark is a one-way ticket to spinsterhood and being overlooked for any potential career path. They have coined the phrase a “Wonder Bread complexion.” Following is an example of the aggressive marketing that illustrates the lengths that the marketers will go to in order to promote their products.
One example is the best-selling product White Beauty. (Ironically, it’s made by Hindustan Unilever Ltd., whose parent company owns Dove, the very brand behind the “real beauty” campaign in North America that tells us that all females should “love” their bodies the way they are.) Hindustan Unilever has cornered the multi-billion-dollar skin-lightening industry in the Indian sub-continent, where, according to one researcher, an estimated 60 per cent of women had used skin- whitening products at one time or another.
White Beauty recently created an expensive “mini-series” advertising campaign using real actors, including Bollywood superstar Saif Ali Khan. The storyline revolves around a love triangle where the girl lost her man to someone with lighter skin until she discovered the wonders of White Beauty. Predictably, the message was that the fair-skinned woman got the man of her dreams.
The Canadian experience
So far, my whole rant seems to be against what I see as the Indian obsession with fair skin, but there is a home-grown dimension to this story. In 2007, two South Asian biochemists in Ottawa were researching ground-breaking technology that looked at making dark skin fairer and they found the holy grail: a product that modifies an individual’s genes. This is where I have an issue. Why are some people treating dark skin as if it’s a disease?
If we tamper with people’s gene structure for such purposes, what does the future hold? Genetically modifying unborn children to have fair skin?
No going black
Now my issue isn’t with the pharmaceutical industry making money — after all that’s their line of business. And I’m not even pointing the finger at the people buying a false promise — well, OK, I am little bit! What I am saying is: “Why are we not proud of who we are?”
There have been documented cases of women killing themselves because they were deemed too dark to get married. When did we lose the ability to think for ourselves and why did we decide that light is beautiful and dark is not?
I understand that culturally other Asian groups see a darker skin as an indication of a person’s social status. We have all heard of the phrase a “farmer’s tan,” referring to the fact that the working classes were traditionally involved in manual, outdoor labour. I have Chinese friends who tell me that they have elderly relatives who carry an umbrella in the summer to prevent getting a tan.
Parental guidance
I once encountered a relative who took me to one side at a family gathering and said “It’s such a shame that XYZ is dark or else she’d be really pretty.” I can’t repeat what I said to him as this is family magazine.
As the father of an impressionable 10-year-old daughter who has a cappuccino complexion but can tan looking at a tube light, I am worried that she, too, will be exposed to this constant bombardment and fall prey to the idea that being darker is bad.
All I’m trying to say is if we don’t like it when other people try to put us into little compartments, then why are we doing this to ourselves? Let’s rejoice in the rainbow of shades that we have and appreciate that ultimately we are all the same and, in the words of the Pussy Cat Dolls: Jai Ho!
Divinder Singh Purewal, 40, is a human resources professional in Surrey, B.C. |
