Maria is a pretty girl,
What you call a bit of awright,
In the shadows, you ken see
She’d almost pass for wite (sic)
It was in Cape Town that I read this observation, scrawled on a wall near the Sunday jetty entrance. My friend and poet, Ernst, known in those days as a Cape Colored, pointed it out to me. It doesn’t change, does it, he said, not even in the new South Africa. We have the same problem in India, I said, we hurt ourselves with equal dexterity. He would not believe it, said I was making it up, just to keep the conversation going.
I said it was a bit much thinking he had the lien on prejudice, it’s a six-way street, even whites can be the target, it works every which way. I said, in India, we start young, we tell kids not to go in the sun, especially if they are girls, we tell them no one will marry you if you are dark. I paint him this verbal picture of millions of little girls running scared, rubbing their tender skins like an army of Lady Macbeths washing, washing, washing to rid themselves of the tan, otherwise, it is straight to a life on the marital shelf. He laughs because he thinks I am being funny. I tell him it is more tragic than he thinks because, when it isn’t legalized, the texture of prejudice can be far more insidious. Siblings are compared, the fairer brother or sister is extended privilege, often unspoken but always there, the other one, she’s a nice girl. Just a bit on the dark side. A brown and black nation using nicknames based on color a generation of teenagers spending pocket money on whitening creams that promise you a lovelier tomorrow, fathers with marriageable daughters tossing in bed with worry and paying Rs22 per column centimeter for the classifieds section where their daughter is sanitized in skin color, a sort of wheatish complexion, the deliberate double “ish” a ringing testimony to the depth of the pigment. Which genetic forefather infested our family tree?
I tell him that fair Indians are about as bad as the most racist Afrikaners were and if an Indian married a black American, the average middle class Indian family woulcurl up and die in a corner of their home. I change tack and tell him how cruel it is, how lovely human beings, especially girls, are victimized in little ways and not so little ways and how, fairer progeny somehow get a better break on things. Even jobs. Fairer people just seem to be more visually acceptable.
I once had a good friend who was Ugandan. Whenever we went out together, shopkeepers, waiters, attendants, cab drivers would have that “you must be getting it” sneer on their faces. She was a highly talented expert in nuclear medicine. Sure, we are afraid of what we don’t know and the prejudice is deep-rooted. Part of it is subliminal. Language. Blackmail. Blackguard. Black-heart. Black deed. Brains whitewashed, the whole Pavlovian effect, see even the words reflect negatives. Yeah, but who made up the language? Black market. Black mark. Black is the poor, the servants, the servile, the bottom rung, hence the prejudice. The whole nine yards of inferiority.
We pontificate endlessly about being anti-discrimination and we discriminate the most. When the Commonwealth Youth team came to Delhi, all the whites were invited to Indian homes. The two blacks were invited to a coffee shop. Even Mahatma Gandhi had this problem with color. In a “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India”, a 2011 biography of the Indian leader by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld, the quotes are clear indictments. Gandhi was a diehard supporter of India’s Hindu caste system, and allegedly, would never mix with a lowly group or caste, and Lelyveld lays out Gandhi’s unedited views: “We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs (offensive term equivalent to the n-word),” Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of Indians settled there. “We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized — the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.”
It is a white man’s world. He wins the battles and the war is nowhere near over. The colonial rule perpetuated the chasm. Hollywood stereotyping has added to it. Pimps are black. Crooks are black. Drug peddlers are black. Black people are aggressive; they will hurt us so let’s hurt them first. They are criminals by perception. Even India’s cinema industry equates villainy with dark skins. Much of it is ignorance and pre-conceived notions of who is what. Commercializing skin lightening products and using advertising to make them synonymous with success have an insidious impact on the mind. The colored are made to feel inferior. Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild says it brilliantly: “Skin color is associated with individuals’ preferences as well as their outcomes. With some exceptions, most Americans prefer lighter to darker skin aesthetically, normatively, and culturally. Filmmakers, novelists, advertisers, modeling agencies, matchmaking websites — all demonstrate the power of a fair complexion, along with straight hair and Eurocentric facial features, to appeal to Americans. Complexion and appearance are also related to how voters evaluate candidates and who wins elections. Given that skin color is connected with attitudes and life outcomes in myriad ways, one would expect it also to be associated with political beliefs and identities. To our knowledge, almost no one has examined this expectation. We did so, and found a surprise: Skin tone seems almost entirely unrelated to the political views of ordinary residents of the United States. We call this anomaly, the skin color paradox.”
Then, we go back home, picking up another tube of complexion-lightening soap. Want to be fair and lovely? Yes. Why are we so stupid? Many of us, regardless of our skin color, have been victims of racism and inverse racism where white people are targeted in an equally hostile and arbitrary manner. The sense of being humiliated and diminished is so strong, you almost feel violated. A restaurant tells you to go away because your dress code is inappropriate and you are stung by the fragile excuse. You are rejected from a job for which you are eminently qualified because you don’t have the right geographical rooting.
Somewhere in the Asian psyche is a color consciousness that makes apartheid look like togetherness personified.
While we might express shock and dismay at this sort of gross prejudice, how much difference is there intrinsically when you compare it to the fact that IPL7 broadcast’s largest advertising contribution was from a monotonous and oft-repeated commercial on skin whitening cream with an emphasis on the dual power it had to lighten your skin tone and make you a happier person. Are these elements not all part of the same insidious links in the chain? Indian law forbids discrimination on grounds of color. But the law offers little protection against barbed wire. And this is what it is. Racial slurring cannot be easily proven even though, paradoxically, casteist slurring can be.
Officially, India has signed and ratified all the relevant international conventions. The jury is still out on how much protection they offer. Can you go to court to fight against discrimination on color? Yes, you can. Will you win the case? Depends on what hue the judge is, but I have still to find a case study where somebody won a legal battle and damages for being color barred…or bruised.
In Bangalore, an NGO started a Brown and Proud campaign. And that is just the point — the color of your skin is nothing to be proud about.
