Shadeism // Breakdown

This is a post I've had in the works for a long time.

I went to India recently.

There's an extremely significant difference in beauty standards, and you can see it walking through the drugstore aisles. In India, they're stocked with creams designed to lighten your skin. Everywhere you go, you see billboards and advertisements for skin whitening brands like Fair & Lovely that correlate fair skin with a happier, more successful life. Girls live in fear of the sun, wasting away inside or in the shade, too afraid to tan. The reason for that is that farmers and people who work in the fields are obviously tan, so lighter skin is seen as a step up on the economic and social ladder of South Asian society.

I remember flipping through matrimonial ads on a long car ride on my recent trip to India (and I could talk about how I feel about objectifying women by advertising them for marriage, but that's for another day). In short, a matrimonial advertisement is a person publishing a description of themselves in an outlet like the Internet or a newspaper and contact information that potential suitors could reach them with. I would see women throw around words like "tall" and "educated" and "slim," but what bothered me the most was "fair." If those brides had been dark-skinned, even with the same body and education level, would it have been as easy for them to find someone to marry?

I've also read about families where lighter-skinned children are treated better, and it's made me think about how much regard we give to something we're born with and can't control. If you watch a Bollywood movie, there's a nonexistent chance that you'll find a dark-skinned main character. In fact, it's much more likely that you'll find a plus-sized or curvy woman as a lead than a dark woman. That doesn't represent India as a whole, because only a few people are fair, but that's what many people desire to have. It also stems from the British colonization of India; seeing that, there's a long-held notion that white skin equates to power.

One of my best friends, even having lived all of her life as an American, was relentlessly made fun of for her darker skin growing up. I was born with olive skin (still on the lighter side of the spectrum), so although I can't necessarily relate to her struggles, I accept that I'll never be white.

Shadeism (also known as colorism) is a counterpart of racism - it's not oppression based on race or ethnic background in general, but it's explicitly based on skin color. It's especially prevalent within races.

Shadeism isn't something that only occurs in Asia and Africa. The issue wasn't her race in particular, but rather her skin color. Most people would look down on the concept of skin lightening or say "That's messed up!" if they ever saw a product commercial, but American society isn't much better.

We probably haven't thought twice about the tan-skin-is-better stigma, but if girls are going to the extent of killing themselves in tanning beds and dousing their skin in bronzer, maybe telling girls that being pale is something to be ashamed of only hurts their body image. It's gotten to the point where a psychological dependence on tanning, dubbed "tanorexia," exists.

It's like there's no way of being perfect, because recently, I've heard of so many scandals with black celebrities being whitewashed in magazines (look up the Kerry Washington InStyle controversy). In an American employment discrimination case, Etienne v. Spanish Lake Truck & Casino Plaza, an employee was kept from advancing because her manager deemed her "too black." An African-American sorority was found to uphold the "paper bag test," by which they wouldn't accept any members whose skin was darker than a paper bag. There's even the time that Takara Allen, a biracial woman, was told by a Tinder date that she should consider bleaching her skin because she'd be "so much prettier if she was whiter." All of those examples promote the beauty ideal that you can't be too much of something. You can't be too pale and you can't be too dark.

Why can't we embrace our skin as it is? If we tan, so what? If we lose that tan, so what? As long as we do what's healthy, skin will be just what it is: skin.

xx Sneha