
India Debates Skin-Tone Bias as Beauty Companies Alter Ads - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/world/asia/india-skin-color-unilever.html
======
rayiner
> 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.

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.)

~~~
Mikeb85
Yup. It's likely that colourism dates back to the Indo-Aryan
invasion/migration of/to India around 4000 years ago. More recent invaders
include the Persians, Mughals, British, etc..., all of whom are typically
lighter in complexion than the indigenous peoples of India.

~~~
thw4234234
Sure it does. I suppose the Geisha of Japan also put on white paint because
they're descended from an alien source planet of pure white Asiatic races.

P.S: Japanese is far more similar to Indian languages than any of their
supposedly 'close' Indo-European cousins.

~~~
rayiner
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_skin_in_Japanese_culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_skin_in_Japanese_culture)

> 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.

------
tuna-piano
At first glance, the skin-whitening creams themselves are seemingly no
different than any other beauty product. After all, what is the difference
between Indians wanting lighter skin and white Americans wanting more tanned
skin?

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).

------
adventured
A girlfriend of mine went to the Philippines for three months for something
school related (her family was originally from there). At the completion of
the classes, they took graduation photos for each student. When she received
the photos, they had transformed her appearance by intentionally lightening
her skin tone (dramatically so) in the photos to make her look more white (her
skin tone is such that she naturally looks like she always has a dark brown
tan). They didn't ask her before they did that, they just assumed it would be
desirable. She then informed me of the incredible popularity of whitening in
some Asian nations (she said that in the Philippines being whiter might
indicate you don't work outside as a farmer or laborer, implying higher social
status).

~~~
tiew9Vii
It's the same for Caucasian people. There's a big market of tanning products
and people generally tanning as some people believe a tan makes you look more
healthy / shows you have wealth as able to travel somewhere hot and sit in the
sun, not working indoors in some factory.

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.

------
ra7
No word on film industry (Bollywood et al)? They have been hugely complicit
with casting heavily favored towards lighter skinned actresses and a lot of
established stars endorsing skin whitening products. They are nowhere to be
seen taking a stance on this issue.

~~~
marcinzm
The article has a number of words on Bollywood:

>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.”

------
xwdv
Part of the colorism bias is also technical. It is much harder to light and
color correct a darker skinned model or actor for a screen or print, leading
the industry to prefer lighter skin tones.

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.

~~~
wtmt
This doesn’t make sense. Technical ability to correct light and color didn’t
fall from the sky. It was created by people who probably didn’t think as much
as they did about one direction as they did about another. The origin is a
lack of diversity or close minded thinking where the preferences started one
way and became established as technical limitations.

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.

------
wtmt
Some people say that this is not racism, but there are various undertones that
imply that dark skinned people are inferior. Just the skin tone is enough in
many instances to help people use stereotypes (leading to both positive and
negative conclusions, and both imagined) and depend on prejudice to guide
their actions. It results in a huge trust deficit and also an internalization
over a long time where dark skinned people consider themselves as inferior or
unworthy.

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).

------
dopu
It's funny how industries whose entire basis lies in the racialized
colonization of the global south become reconstituted in a way that maintains
their existence, but further obscures their origin. Perhaps true justice would
mean the complete abolition of this industry (and the economic/political
structures that brought it about). But instead we now force it to put on more
and more masks to justify its continued existence, and in so doing, make the
system harder to understand. In my mind this is how liberalism, i.e. the
attempt at making capitalism more progressive, can be a double-edged sword.

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.

