Whiteness and Beauty

When I was younger, one of my close friends in elementary school would often come over to my house to hang out with me. I remember my mom telling my aunt about how my friend was so beautiful with her pale, white skin and blue eyes. This was one of the rare instances that my mom ever expressed her belief of  light skin as being the ideal. For the most part, my parents never made a point to raise my siblings and I with the idea that light skin was more beautiful. Now, had my skin actually been dark enough that people would point it out as I was growing up, I think my experience would have been very different.

The skin colour thing has been a huge issue across South Asia. There is an entire industry dedicated to selling products that claim to lighten one’s skin. The truth is, this industry only thrives because of the very impactful process that goes into raising girls with the mentality that their skin colour is not good enough and not seen as beautiful. White so easily becomes the ideal and girls intuitively pick this up from a very young age. My best friend goes out of her way to avoid the sun in the summer and will make comments like “Ugh I can feel my skin getting darker” or “I look too dark in that picture”. This is the product of a lifetime of hearing the “Wow your daughter is so beautiful” comments go to her cousins and friends with lighter skin.

It is incredibly sad to know that there is such a huge impact on the self-esteem of millions of girls because they are unhappy with their skin colour, something that is impossible to change. In weddings across India and Pakistan, women almost always have makeup that is several shades lighter than their skin tone. It is the face of a porcelain doll painted over them. And we all know what colour these dolls are. What’s worse is how easy it is to internalize this hatred of your own skin colour and how difficult it is to stop seeing white as the ideal. In fact, I don’t even know if I could get my own parents to understand that the sky being blue and white being beautiful do not hold the same factual equivalence. To try to explain the social construction of race and the historical process of white supremacy, means that they would have to be willing to unlearn and relearn. And even then, I worry that white as superior is rooted so deep within them.

In lecture, Suzanne talked about Stuart Hall explaining how the white eye is unnamed yet everything is positioned within the frame but because it is unnamed, it is unquestioned and unnoticed. If you’re watching a movie without thinking, you could easily watch something that has no people of color in it and not even notice. When I was in high school, I read a lot of young adult teen fiction and romance novels. I don’t think I ever read a single book in these genres where the main characters were not white. As a child, I enjoyed writing short stories and looking back now, my characters were always white despite the fact that I am not. My white characters lived in their white world with their white family and friends. It was just natural that they would be white and I did this without thinking. This in itself, is a powerful example of how easily we have internalized the superiority of the white body. I have so many experiences and so many things that are a part of my culture that I could’ve created a character around, yet I chose to write stories with characters who were reflective of all the other books I had read and of the movies I had seen.

Movies, books, and all other forms of media shape the way that all of these girls who desire lighter skin see the world. In a world of eurocentric beauty standards, understanding racial formation is one of the most powerful tools to dismantle the messages that we have been getting our entire lives about what is beautiful. For me, expanding the definition of beauty has only had a positive impact in my life.