White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

by Ruby Hamad

darker skin was seen as an indicator of poverty. “There is an incredible amount of shame about being a migrant farmworker,” she told me. “My mom didn’t want us getting prieta—dark-colored or tanned. We would wear a long-sleeved shirt with a long-sleeved dress shirt over that, heavy blue jeans, gloves, a large hat, and sunglasses. And the temperature would be in the hundreds.” Years later, this woman took up waterskiing and her mother would still get upset, just as mine does. “Every time I would visit her, she would make an awful face and say I ‘look so prieta.’” Samra. Prieta. It seems there’s a tacitly derogatory word for it in every language. In India, antipathy toward darker skin is so rife that a recent study found that 70 percent of both male and female respondents wanted to date a fair-skinned partner. According to the research team at Hindustan Unilever, the British-Dutch-founded corporation behind Fair & Lovely, India’s most popular skin-whitening product, “90% of Indian women and girls view skin lightening as a ‘high need’” because “it is aspirational, like losing weight. A fair skin is like education, regarded as a social and economic step up.” But why would so many South Asian women come to think this way? At least part of this yearning to be fairer can be put down to the aggressive marketing of such products. Typical marketing shows potential suitors choosing fairer-skinned partners over their darker rivals, and it doesn’t stop at merely promoting lighter skin.