Make Me White

Published: 05/11/2009

Make Mine White
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

An acquaintance, Umi, whose family is from the Gujarat in India has skin the colour of dark teak and big black eyes. We are having tea in a small café. She is agitated because her younger, fairer sister has had a good marriage proposal while Umi, 28, is still waiting for her Mr Right: ’What did I do wrong in previous life? I will do anything to change this horrible colour, the round nose and look, just look at this fat, flat Indian face, no bone shape at all. Let’s go to a plastic surgeon, if two of us maybe we can get a discount. Buy one get one free!’ She is a primary school teacher in a large UK city. Do I hug her and laugh companionably or challenge her grotesque desires and values? Where do these come from? It is, for sure, the cultural habitat which privileges whiteness, even in the 21st Century. That partly, only partly, explains Umi’s pathological self-mortification.

Gazing at the mirror at my age is always testing as callous time etches and doodles on it relentlessly. But it is my face, uniquely mine, still able to attract the odd flirty bloke. Unlike Umi, I don’t recoil from my own image even though arbiters of beauty have forever judged women of the East and South to be aesthetically and biologically inferior to white females. Coloured skin is a curse unless it is a fake tan and those flat noses or big fleshy ones, thick lips (considered gorgeous on Scarlett Johannsen but not Whoopi Goldberg), short necks and legs, apple and plum shapes. What a lot of uglies we are, unworthy, unfit to kiss the feet of fashion goddesses and Hollywood stars. In most glossy magazines and on billboards models are mostly white. They daily remind us people of colour that we are not worth it.

Take Charlize Theron advertising a perfume brand on the back covers of several Sunday newspaper magazines this week, golden hair, ivory skin, bright, radiant eyes, burnished lips, diffusing luminosity like a full moon:’ The Absolute Femininity’ says the caption. She joins the galaxy of exquisite blondes, past and present- from Marilyn Monroe to Helen Mirren and Twiggy and now to Sienna Miller, Nicole Kidman and Kate Hudson. Dark haired Audrey Hepburn, Catherine Zeta Jones and Julia Roberts and our ubiquitous Cheryl Cole are also up there, white women whose beauty sets the standard and raises hopeless aspirations among many Caribbean, African, Chinese, Arab and eastern women who want to shed ( or shred) their racial features so they too can dazzle. So they imagine, the brainwashed millions.

Dream makers have always projected idealized and unattainable images of women – to create insecurities and stimulate desires. That’s what they do. Sadly countless non-Europeans cannot resist their pernicious influence.

They know too that skin colour can make or break you. Surveys in the US have long shown that all things being equal, lighter skinned black people get more job and life chances than do those with darker skins. These discriminatory employer choices were still evident in research carried out at the University of Georgia as late as 2006. The combination of superb talent and honey skin make stars like Halle Berry and Beyonce irresistible. Tracy Chapman, fine singer but too black remains in the shadows. Michael Jackson understood that reality, internalised the prejudice and that destroyed him. Jackson has many followers, people who have absorbed denigrating messages and behaviours and reproduce them. Unfortunately we now also get militant ‘blackists’ who cannot accept as equals anyone of mixed race or lighter skin. Obama is not black enough for them because he had one white parent.

Centuries after slavery and various imperial conquests ( which embedded the idea of white supremacy and black lowliness) and decades after the struggles for caste and race equality, non-Europeans are more not less ‘colourist’. I personally know anti-racist activists who prefer light-skinned lovers and partners. Leona Lewis and Lewis Hamilton are envied their looks by many ambitious black Britons. I overheard two, young mixed-race girls this week who agreed that Rachel Adedeji had to be dropped from X factor because she was too dark for people to like her. ( Really? So how come Alexandra Burke won last year?) We have to accept that such sick and sad attitudes also come from within, from their families, communities, countries and inside their own heads.

Rani Moorthy, a brilliant theatre actress and playwright has written movingly on shade discrimination in Asian communities, using her own searing experiences. When only a child, her Grandmother advised her to get some skills because no man would marry her:’ It was because I was dark skinned. It was treated as a disease and every Friday I would have oil baths in an attempt to lighten the skin’ My own mum, open minded in every other way, slapped chick flour paste on my face for the same reason and did not let me have coffee or tea for fear it would make me dark.

In the eighties I used to train teachers so they could deal confidently with multiracial classes. They were intensely worried about black and Asian children who stubbornly described themselves as white and sometimes used brillo pads to rub off their ‘bad’ skin. One Somali young girl, Safia mutilated and broke the only black doll in class and threw it into the toilet bowl. I thought we had moved on from those days. Evidently not. A fresh batch has arrived of ‘ethnic’ men and women who detest themselves and their race and are desperately seeking Europeanization. A study in America found that plastic surgery among minorities had quadrupled between 1997 to 2003. Here too the figure is shooting up and now men are joining in the race to be white.

I know Muslim men who are going off to Pakistan to have operations to make them look less ‘Muslim’ and to have their body hair eradicated. In that blasted country where limbs are blown off everyday, there is now a thriving cosmetic surgery industry. British glamour model Jet, is of Caribbean origin and wants to look like a Barbie Doll. She has her nose and face fixed so as not to be mistaken for those pram pushing black women who she says ‘don’t want to move on with their lives’. A young Asian bloke called Mun was viciously attacked by a white gang and so now goes through serial surgery to make his features as western as possible. He wants to show his racist attackers that he too can look like them and ITALS previous- become a model. So there. He claims he is not denying his ethnic identity, only wants to join the ‘mainstream’. He strongly believes ’ It’s not cool to be Indian. Its not attractive to be Indian’ Darling boy, much deluded, expecting a second child. Hope the newborn has the good sense to be ‘mainstream’.

As demand increases, suppliers come forth. A new army of plastic surgeons has risen, promising to make any race look more Caucasian, more gorgeous. One of them, a slippery smooth Dr Shailesh Vadodaria claims they are thereby creating a new ‘de-racialised’ world: ‘Its part of the globalisation process where ethnic differences are going to be narrower and narrower’. They have charts and measurements, percentages and figures to show our faces are more brutish and less pleasing than those of Caucasians. Some of these creepy rich gits appeared last Tuesday on Bleach, Nip, Tuck: The White Beauty Myth on Channel 4.

There was Tahira, a likeable Bangladeshi woman who hates her toffee coloured skin because her own people say she is horribly dark, especially when compared with the light colour of her husband. She said; ‘ I dream about how to become white, how to look white and beautiful. Michael Jackson, I love his colour. I mean, I just want to know what type of things he used to become that colour.’ So smiling broadly, Dr Jacque Otto, obliged, sold her stuff in a jar costing a fortune. Who knows if it will work. What we do know is that many whitening creams can cause irreversible damage. Another Channel4 programme featured a French doctor, Dr Jean-Marc Guichet who extends the legs of oriental females, an excruciating process to make them into Jerry Hall pins. Or not. Short Malaysian male immigrants to Britain go to him too because they feel un-sexy, diminutive, unmanned living in the forest of Anglo-Saxon masculinity,

Globalisation has led, it seems, to this latest bout of racial cloning, which is somewhat mystifying. India, Brazil and China are set to be the big economic engines of the world. You would expect their people to be proud to be themselves. Millions are not. Admittedly all three countries have had a long history of colourism before and after interactions with Europeans. But we are supposedly living in a brave new world. Key sectors of the media are changing. Popular TV programmes like Friends and Sex in the City were all white series, but today the most popular programmes, especially reality shows, feature a cornucopia of racial types. Yet in all these emerging nations western bodies and faces have prime status and kudos. Indian actresses once were all shapes and colours. Now top Bollywood female stars are pale and have green or light brown eyes ( or contact lenses). Disgracefully the most highly paid male Bollywood actor, Shahrukh Khan fronted a massive advertising campaign for a male face cream called ‘Fair and Handsome’ where the darkie chap is a loser until he lightens up and gets the girls.

British Chinese and Vietnamese women are having their eyes widened and breasts enlarged because their men like them better that way. On Asian marriage sites or matchmaking newspaper adverts third generation British Asian men want ‘wheaten’ brides. Asian fashion magazines regularly use dark-haired Eastern European models. In black communities western features are craved, hair is straightened, skin lightened for reasons profoundly disturbing. Jet gets herself a pointy, long nose. Now, she says, she looks rich enough to shop in Waitrose.

‘Ethnic’ psychosis is manifestly getting worse. Identities and human biodiversity are under threat. Is anyone out there listening?

Not Umi for sure. She has made an appointment with a Harley Street doctor to begin her de-racialisation, starting with the nose and chin. She hopes, after spending thousands of pounds she will find an Italian face looking back at her in the mirror. I have several letters from parents and teachers worried that a number of non-white children are rejecting their looks and identities. One mother writes:’ My children are Afro-English. It had got better- my older daughter was happy with her curly hair and lovely brown skin. Schools had books about mixed race families and black dolls and every child felt included. That’s why I was unprepared for this. My younger daughter Betty, eight, says she hates her hair and her African dad. His own mother says Betty is too dark. She pulls her hair out and keeps scratching her arms as if she wants to tear off her skin. We are getting her psychological counselling and it is tearing us apart. I really thought we had beaten this’ So did I.

Back in the sixties the Black is Beautiful movement in the US spread across the world and made us proud to be who we were, even in Kampala, Uganda where I was growing up. I stopped ironing my hair to look like Jean Shrimptons and my African college room-mates went Afro. No more burnt hair in the sink and a new dawn we thought. For a few decades, yes. Now comes globalisation spreading Starbucks and standardised western notions and a surge in ‘ethnic’ self loathing and self mutilation. What is different now is the absence of any political and social fight back. Race is dispensable, can be wiped out if you can pay for the privilege. Then what? Do Jet and Mun really think they will be good enough for the BNP? When, oh when will we stop being our own worst enemies?



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Published in Daily Mail