Today I was reading a news item on The Mint on the Indian advertisment watchdog ASCI - Advertising Standards Council of India pulling up Procter & Gamble for making tall claims in an ad for one of its skin care products. It sent me thinking about all those fairness creams ads that we have been seeing for a long time and the kind of claims that they make. It is not really new for marketing companies to make tall claims about their products. I am quite surprised that the ASCI has suddenly acquired an increased awareness for such advertisments ! Couple this with fairness creams becoming the new obsession with the honourable Health Minister Mr.Anbumani Ramadoss and probably things fall into place
But , the ASCI or Ramadoss is not what prompted to write this piece. It is the very obsession of the general Indian public with "fairness" and this undying quest for a fairer skin. Don't you think the very idea of using a fairness cream is inherently racist. I definitely thinks so and to find out if someone else had already written about this before I blogged the title of our blog on google and found this
http://www.indianeye.org/tag/fairness-creams/
About a year back Arun Nair has actually written about the same thing that I wanted to write about now. I am really surprised that in all this time I have never looked at it from such a perspective. All along , I ve just felt trying to become fair is indeed a "fair aspiration" to have. But when you go a little further and really think about the underpinnings of this aspiration you do find that fairness is now a symbol of beauty , a quality to possess , so much so that if you are dark skinned you are made to feel inadequate and the first thing that you want to do is go to the nearest store and buy one of the fairness creams to tone down the melanine in your skin. Fairness , as a higher attribute , is now firmly entrenched as part of our culture. Could this be because we were ruled for two centuries by white skinned men ? I am not too sure !
Arun Nair's article says everything that I had wanted to say . To avoid the redundancy I would stop the post here.
It pains me to think that we are not proud of the attributes showered on us by nature. Instead we seek to become something we just not are simply because the society associates a higher value to it !
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3 comments:
More on Fairness Creams and their true "colour" :
http://www.copperwiki.org/index.php/Fairness_Cream
i think the idea of indians being racist came to journalistic prominence durin the harbhajan-symonds scandal. There were a whole slew of articles. arun nair's article also refers to the episode and i guess its from the same period..
i agree with you and arun nair.. racism manifests itself in many many forms in india. Our society is still largely afflicted by religion and caste..
And we do have a fetish for the fair skin which I think predates the british by hundreds of year, if not more.. Haven't Indian women used sandalwood paste/turmeric/other stuff on their skin for a long while? Btw are white women who like/want to get a tan, racist too?
In your article, you point out that considering fairness to be a symbol of beauty is racism.. I could argue that the very notion of 'beauty' is racist.. Unless you include everyone/everything in the list of beautiful people/objects(which makes it lose its special standing in the first place), beauty is a divide(albeit a subjective one).
The definition of racism is so broad that it encompasses a lot of things.. Wiki says Racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.
Ever since the harbhajan episode, i have thought a lot about racism - and it has me confused.. Where is the line between being a racist and having a preference? if some guy likes blondes over brunettes, is that racist?(forgive my example, i am not trying to discriminate between genders. it was the quickest example i could think of other than the fairness example discussed in your post). i wouldnt think so.. Because the fact that someone prefers blondes is NOT going to 'nullify the recognition, enjoyment, or exercise of human rights, political,social,economic and cultural freedom of a brunette! So as a single person, "preference/bias" clearly does not matter. Whereas, if an entire town preferred blondes over brunettes, surely that would impact atleast the social and culture freedom of brunettes right ?(would u not feel depressed if no one in town wants to date you becasue of your hair color. which is exactly the problem with fairness too).
Here's what i am trying to say. If one man has a strong preference or bias, it is not construed as racism. But if a community, town, city or country has it, it can definitely LEAD to racism.. My question is DOES a mass preference ALWAYS lead to "what is construed" as racism ?
The individual clearly has an argument to retain his preference - if he/she cannot, it is a denial of the fundamental right of choice.. So where is the line between individual choice and racism ? is it just in the numbers?
I am first going to reply to G and then proceed to comment on the article.
@passion
You are right, there can be a preference certainly. Say when you want to get married or pick up a girl in a bar, you want a fair one, thats a preference.
But when you are running a private school and you wont give darker kids admission, thats racist.
To me, any act that shows prejudice because of color is racism.
(In the first case too you have racist tendencies, but they are covered by the bigger blanket of "Freedom of Choice")
@optimistic Indian
As a country we are white obsessed. We have the white man syndrome. we do. We think fair people are pretty, we think fair people are superior.
I have been to weddings where i have heard comments like "The bride is so dark, not a match at all". i know of people who ask their doctors if their baby which was just born was fair or dark!!
we have a fairness obsession and the worse we think we are inferior because of our color. until we learn to embrace our color and think brown is beautiful, these fairness cream advertisements will continue to haunt our television boxes.
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