Borders and Belonging: Skin Tone and Social Status

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When I was younger, I’d ask my mum about what age I could start using whitening creams, to which she’d say never and remind me that they can cause cancer. She’d make the case that others would spend time abroad or on tanning beds to have my skin shade. This never convinced me. I’ve never used whitening creams but I know that if I was allowed, younger me would have.

While our confidence usually grows with age, there are certain feelings or beliefs that linger. For me, one of these was what whiteness represents to many. The second article in “Borders and Belonging” explores colourism (a prejudice that targets skin tone) and colonialism, with a focus on beauty standards and the global south.

In a 1971 BBC interview, Muhammad Ali famously asked “Why is everything white?”, stating that what confused him growing up was that “Everything was white – Santa Claus was white – and everything bad was black. The little ugly duckling was a black duck, and the black cat was bad luck, and if I threaten you, I’m gonna ‘blackmail’ you.” He further pointed out that many of the products of his time were labeled “white”, like White Swan soap, King White soap, and White Cloud tissue paper. He went on to question why all the celebrated models of the world are usually white and how beauty is only seen on eurocentric women. He questioned representation and imagery, like why angels, Santa Clause, Snow White and Tarzan, are all white, “and the president lives in The White House”.

Nearly sixty years on from that interview, whiteness as a political force continues to stain most of my interactions, both at university and beyond. But before exploring colourism and beauty standards influenced by colonial rule, it’s important to start with colourism at its most violent, Blanqueamiento.

Blanqueamiento literally means “whitening” or “bleaching” and is often used in the context to refer to the historical practice of a woman of colour being pressured or forced to marry or bear the children of white men, and their mixed raced children the same, until after a few generations, their African, Aboriginal, or Latin America DNA was no longer visible on the child’s face – Until a child is born ‘fully white’.

Such violence was not only routinely perpetuated so that the grand or great grandchildren of people of colour are birthed “better looking” to European colonial standards, but also because with white skin, privilege and power followed. In this way, Blanqueamiento maintained white dominance in social hierarchy. When many think of white supremacy, they instantly imagine white nationalist rallies. Rarely however, does one think of the 1895 painting, “Ham’s Redemption” by Modesto Brocos which depicted this practice.

It seems that even today, as Reni Eddo-Lodge stated in her essay, Forming Blackness Through A Screen, political whiteness, ‘seeps, and strangles, and silences’.

Blanqueamiento is reflected in our internal beliefs, perception of beauty standards and language. The Spanish phrase “mejorar la raza” literally translates to “improve the race” or “better the race” which is often used as a joke but refers to marrying a person of a lighter skin tone to birth lighter-skinned offspring.

Last term, during my year abroad in Armenia, my classmates and I encountered a group of tourists who were carrying umbrellas to shade from the sun. After we joked between ourselves that carrying umbrellas was “dramatic”, one of my classmates pointed out that they perhaps do not want to get “dark”, to which another classmate said that they understand because “it’s not nice to be dark, you know”. Thinking about how I myself used to feel when I was younger, I responded with “yeah”.

The desire to remain light or become lighter is also prevalent among many in the UK. Recently, I expressed the challenges that come from being a person of colour in white-dominated spaces to someone else, using Oxford as an example. They replied by explaining that respect is dependent on how one presents themselves or is presented. They used the example of white teeth and how no one will trust a dentist with rotten teeth or a hairdresser with unkept hair, but they then casually linked this to how one dresses, mentioning the fact that I wear hijab and then further linked their explanation to skin colour.

The person I was having this discussion with argued that for some people, certain skin colours are markers of intelligence in people’s minds, and hence it’s not a shock if people treat me and others as though we are less intelligent. It could be that because my conversation with said person was already heated, I misunderstood their intent whether they were attempting to understand those who view me as less than, whether they were justifying it, or whether they were only innocently stating a ‘fact’, that whiteness is viewed synonymously with intelligence, higher class and the ‘peak of civilisation’.

However, If their argument comparing dentists needing to have good teeth is to be taken to the logical extreme, anyone could justify using whitening creams or injections as “grooming” and looking “put together”. I reject this idea.

Historically, people of colour have been excluded from many academic spaces. Our lack of representations in these spaces is not due to lack of innate ability or deficiency, but lack of opportunity to flourish, as Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, “I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops”.

I was most reminded of this quote when I glanced up in the Great Hall in Christ Church College and saw the wall flooded with paintings of Oxford’s most influential alumni, and not one looked like me. Last time I checked, before my year abroad, all but one were white men. I didn’t automatically desire to be “white”, but subconsciously, this strengthened a deeply held belief in me, that whiteness is the physical representation of what many aspire to be, whether educated, cultured, skilled, affluent and so on.

This subconscious belief, as well as the literal desire for white skin is seen in almost all parts of the world, especially the global south. In TV and media, white skin is at the forefront of Bollywood & K-Drama, and makeup and skincare adverts repeatedly cast fairer actors and models. When VICENews questioned an Indian modelling agency regarding why they were recruiting Ukrainian models to India rather than casting Indian women, one of the backstage makeup artists responded with “Indian’s aren’t fair”.

Speaking of makeup, many brands like Hourglass & Physician, IT Cosmetics, Benefit, Tarte, and Chanel have had limited product options for their customers with darker skin. Many did not offer darker foundation shades and when they finally did, after pressure campaigns, customers argued that they were poorly formulated and that the brand’s ‘efforts’ were performative.

Apart from makeup and skincare products not catering to darker skin, many brands market “whiteness” as a product to their non-white customers, profiting off of their internalised inferiority and insecurities.

These companies market body positivity to their western consumers but in the same light, market white superiority to their non-western consumers in Asia and Africa. Unilever, for instance, owns both Dove and Fair&Beauty. However, Dove has built its entire brand around redefining beauty with its slogan “All skin is beautiful” while Fair&Lovely which is owned by the same company and marketed and sold in India, is centered around achieving a fairer, lighter complexion. The same company preaches different values under different products depending on the demographics they wish to profit off of.

Similarly, Nivea only sells skin whitening creams in Africa, and in their adverts, repeatedly use words like ‘natural’ alongside ‘white’, subliminally sending the message that ‘black’ must therefore not be natural and instead must be abnormal and in need of ‘fixing’.

After pressure from campaigns, heightened after the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, Fair&Lovely changed their brand name to Glow&Lovely, but despite this, 80% of moisturisers sold in India are marketed as also being “lightening”.

It’s easy (and lazy) to blame people of colour for the popularity of whitening creams by arguing that darker skin demographics tend to buy these products, keeping the industry thriving and reinforcing colourism. This however, ignores the fact that desire for white or lighter skin emerged among black and mixed-race women when they first started using natural remedies – and later, chemical products – to lighten skin as a means of survival.

Lighter skin didn’t just emulate power and status, but also meant more access to resources and elite spaces. Whiteness demanded respect. A respect that was never extended to marginalised people of colour. Particularly for women of colour, whiteness meant beauty, femininity and womanhood. These attitudes and practices have simply lived on because they have been so heavily reinforced through marketing and calculated representation.

The 1940s Clark Doll experiment by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark gave identical black and white dolls to 3-7 year old African-American children from both segregated and integrated schools, and asked them questions such as which dolls was “nice,”bad,” had “nice color,” and lastly which doll looked like them. Children were biased towards the white doll, and answered that it was the “good” one with the “nice colour”, and that it was also the one that did not look like them.

This study has been replicated in all corners of the world many times since the 1940s. It has, till this day, always produced the same results. This speaks volumes about children of colour’s self perception and the internalised racism that can be fostered, even by toddlers as young as three.

In most times and places, whiteness has been linked to class, status, and superiority, even for white demographics. Elizabeth I would use toxic lead makeup, Venetian Ceruse, to give herself a chalk-white appearance, poisoning her to death, although other perspectives argue that her intent was not only to align with Renaissance beauty standards, but to cover smallpox scars. Historians further argue that colourism also bled into India’s caste hierarchy system where those ranked lowest have the darkest skintone.

The skin whitening industry is predicted to reach $12 billion by next year, with the WHO finding that 40% of people in China and India regularly use skin whitening products. Many of these on-the-shelf skin whitening products are full of toxic chemicals like Mercury, Hydroquinone ( a carcinogen), and steroids. In some creams, there is sixteen thousand times more Mercury than what is the legal and safe amount.

Hydroquinone is banned in Australia, Japan, South Africa and the UK. In countries which it is not banned in, any product containing more than 2% can only be accessed through a prescription. Despite this, some products contain double the legal (and safe) amount. In the UK, many of these products are sold unregulated or on the black market.

In India, which was under British colonial rule for 200 years, Fair&Lovely is a household item, while in the Philippines, which was under Spanish colonial rule for 400 years, Glutathione drips are more popular, offered in salons as well as in at home do-it-yourself kits. This is despite warnings from the FDA of adverse effects on the liver, kidney, and nervous system. People are risking their health and well being to conform to a standard they did not set themselves

Again, I admit that I too once desperately desired to use these cremes. I admit that teenage me would photoshop every single photo and selfie to make me a few shades lighter.

But it’s necessary to also give context: I was told by people that I’d be prettier if I had softer ethnic features. This is not just one comment said to me, but a rhetoric expressed to so many people. Accounts from Black British women in a 2018 BBC documentary echoed this. Women recalled that throughout their childhood and teenage years, friends and peers would tell them “you have very pretty features even though your skin is dark” and that “makeup is an opportunity to look lighter”. They recalled that even black school boys told them they’d “never date a black thing”.

Colourism, internalised racism, and beauty standards are intertwined. I wonder what made most three year olds think that the black doll that looked like them was the “bad” and “ugly looking” doll. I wonder why many people send their graduation and wedding photos for editing, only to be a few shades lighter. It saddens me to admit that teenage me thought that I would do the same for my graduation photos.

What I wish to convey the most is that while we study in a white dominated space, surrounded by paintings and statues of other white people who also studied here, we must never assume that this somehow means that whiteness is superior or that it is the defining mark of intellect. We are in a white-dominated environment but this is no reason to deem others around us as “better” and hence attempt to cosplay someone else, whether through changing our names, hiding parts of our identity, or attempting to physically change our appearance.

It seems that even today, as Reni Eddo-Lodge stated in her essay, Forming Blackness Through A Screen, that political whiteness, ‘seeps, and strangles, and silences’.

Last term, on my year abroad in Armenia, my classmates and I encountered a large group of East Asian tourists who were all, every single person, carrying umbrellas to shade from the sun. After we joked between ourselves that carrying umbrellas was “dramatic”, one of my classmates pointed out that they perhaps do not want to get “dark”, to which another classmate said that they understand because “it’s not nice to be dark, you know”. I subconsciously responded with “yeah”.

The desire to remain light or become lighter is also prevalent among many in the UK. Recently, I expressed the challenges that come from being a person of colour in white- dominated spaces to someone else, using Oxford as an example. They replied by explaining that respect is dependent on how one presents themselves or is presented. They used the example of white teeth and how no one will trust a dentist with rotten teeth or a hairdresser with unkept hair, but they then casually linked this to how one dresses, mentioning the fact that I wear hijab and then further linked their explanation to skin colour.

Many companies market body positivity to their western consumers but in the same light, market white superiority to their non-western consumers in Asia and Africa. Unilever, for instance, owns both Dove and Fair&Beauty. However, Dove has built its entire brand around redefining beauty with its slogan “All skin is beautiful” while Fair&Lovely which is owned by the same company and marketed and sold in India, is centered around achieving a fairer, lighter complexion. The same company preaches different values under different products depending on the demographics they wish to profit off of.

The 1940s Clark Doll experiment by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark gave identical black and white dolls to 3-7 year old African American children from both segregated and integrated schools, and asked them questions such as which dolls was “nice,”bad,” had “nice color,” and lastly which doll looked like them. Children were biased towards the white doll, and answered that it was the “good” one with the “nice colour”, and that it was also the one that did not look like them.

In all times and places, whiteness has been linked to class, status, and superiority, even for white demographics. Elizabeth I would use toxic lead makeup, Venetian Ceruse, to give herself a chalk-white appearance, poisoning her to death, although other perspectives argue that her intent was not only to align with Renaissance beauty standards, but to cover smallpox scars. Historians further argue that colourism also bled into India’s caste hierarchy system where those ranked lowest have the darkest skintone.

In countries which it is not banned in, any product containing more than 2% can only be accessed through a prescription. Despite this, some products contain double the legal (and safe) amount. In the UK, many of these products are sold unregulated or on the black market.

Again, I admit that I too once desperately desired to use these cremes. I admit that teenage me would photoshop every single photo and selfie to make me a few shades lighter.

Colourism, internalised racism, and beauty standards are intertwined. My heart breaks for every three year old that thought that the black doll that looked like them was the “bad” and “ugly looking” doll. My heart also breaks for the many people who send their graduation and wedding photos for editing, only to be a few shades lighter. It saddens me to admit that teenage me thought that I would do the same for my graduation photos.