Opinion: Thankfully comfortable in our own skins

She changed herself

I came across a video on Facebook where a married and successful Cameroonian model appeared on television to talk about her experience and pride with skin lightening.

The Atlantic BlackStar published the video with the title - This African Model’s Attitude Towards Skin Bleaching Only Confirms the Impact of Colorism on Global Scale.

There is probably a global discussion on colour politically referred to as ‘Colorism’, I am not particularly interested in taking sides. However, reading through the Facebook comments that were posted, I could see the excoriation and the condemnation expressed by many and could very well understand their views on the matter.

Here was a heretofore stunningly beautiful woman who for whatever reasons that could not be fully expressed in that interview or any other forum, who had transmogrified into something that might be beautiful to her but less so to others.

My comment

I posted a comment to that discussion where I took a broader view of the issue along the lines below:

“At which point I wonder what my skin will look like blue and my hair green.

Much as I can agree with the views expressed we should be careful not to see this matter superficially.

When I was recuperating from chemotherapy I channel-hopped to the E! Channel and saw Dr. 90210 where beautiful people had gotten into their minds they were not so beautiful that they needed cosmetic or radical change.

We link appearance with confidence down to some adverts suggesting tampons, I'm sorry, make all the difference.

The question then is whether mind, society or some other pressure led to the 'desecration' of the original beauty.

Let us be thankful we are comfortable in our own skins.”

Is this harmful?

Watching the interview, I could not help but notice the look of incredulity on the face of the other lady interviewing, as if she wondered of the apparent caricature, and I use that word advisedly, was for real.

And whilst the lady might have been convinced of the change she had wrought upon herself, I was more scared of the message and the example she might represent to others less successfully or privileged that they resort to changes to their bodies that can bring lasting harm.

At a point in that interview she referenced the use of the bleaching agent hydroquinone which even in topic applications of 2% concentration is banned in the EU, at 4%, it should be prescribed and to hear of her 16% concentrations, one can only imagine the damage done to her once beautifully natural skin.

Looks quite harmful

The FDA already considers hydroquinone a potential carcinogen and according the Wikipedia reference or hydroquinone, this line is best lifted verbatim. “This conclusion was reached based on the extent of absorption in humans and the incidence of neoplasms in rats in several studies where adult rats were found to have increased rates of tumours, including thyroid follicular cell hyperplasias, anisokaryosis, mononuclear cell leukaemia, hepatocellular adenomas and renal tubule cell adenomas. The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has also highlighted concerns.” [Wikipedia] [Campaign For Safe Cosmetics - Hydroquinone]

It goes without saying much as I am not an active supporter of vivisection that the results from animal testing might well indicate hydroquinone as an agent for skin bleaching is not healthy and almost conclusively very harmful, all in the quest for a form of superficial beauty or the destruction of original beauty.

Yet, for whatever reasons this lady has taken radical measures to dispense of the tone of her original skin colouration, disfigurement is too strong a word, we that have either lacked the opportunity to do so or have decided we have no need to do so should be thankful that for now, we are comfortable in our own skins.

Thought Picnic: Gosh! I have a black face

Is it …?

Maybe there isn’t much to read into this but I do remember about 15 years ago planning to visit a young family and I found myself asking whether their two boys have ever seen or met anyone of my race.

I just had the feeling that they having lived in a somewhat expatriate community in the United States and then moving back to Suffolk they might not have been exposed. Those silly assumptions fed my imagination with pictures of two kids under 5 hiding behind daddy’s legs and stealthily coming round to poke me to see if I will react before scurrying back to the protection of daddy.

My makeup is permanent

That is what I think prepared me for an episode yesterday at Upminster station where I was waiting to board a train into London. The waiting room has a heater on timer so I always go in there to get some warmth considering it was raining cats and dogs with blustering wind to boot.

There, I saw a man probably in his late twenties and his son, maybe not even 3 years old yet, sat in his buggy. I switched on the heater and as I stood by taking in the warmth, I looked at the boy and this conversation between them ensued.

Son: Look, he’s got a black face.

Father: He’s a man.

The appropriateness of that conversation can be left to conjecture as I smiled pretending not to be shocked by it all.

In 2012?

The boy had just been picked up from spending a week’s holiday with his grandparents and Upminster for all intents and purposes is not entirely out in the sticks and completely beyond civilisation. If the boy lived anywhere in London and from whatever baggage they had, they were not travelling far; one can only wonder how and why the boy could not have noticed and realised that black faces are not all that rare.

Kids have a way of learning fast and learning well from their environments. I would hate to think that influences around the boy had negatively coloured his quite impressionable young mind. It is not like we are in the 1960s when the sight of a person of colour was so much a curiosity as to be cause for amusement, surprise and fear.

Really?

All the knowledge the father could impart to the child was that I am a man. It made me wonder if I had a red face or a green face, dare I say a yellow face or a blue face and by the time I have a grey face, I might well be a weather vane.

If anything, for the sake of the well-being of that child, they all need to get out a bit more and if they have been saying silly things, that child will be growing up in a society that will be radically different from what he has been hearing or been fed and maybe next time, I will roll up my sleeves and pull up the leg of my trousers just to show that I not only have a black face and it is not a paint job either.

Abort this preschool finger-painting politics immediately

It was not a joke afterall

With the sound of the television in the background, I just heard that there was going to be a Labour Party Political broadcast. Prick up your ears, instinctively.

Then like the surreal morphing into the ethereal with so much to chuckle about, I remembered a scene in Just for Laughs where on three occasions; three unassuming men were accosted by a team of uniformed men who jumped out of van lifted up the unsuspecting victims and carried then back from crossing the road, that was a laugh.

The comical voice started about true blue, red, yellow and then something about being conservative to the core to being the heir of Blair and then a liberal conservative. [1]

Surely! A democratic campaign seeking the votes of intelligent Britons cannot have boiled down to this triviality, which would make Telly Tubbies seem a complete bore.

I see your true colours

However, the full import of this message did not dawn on me till I heard the Conservative Party Political broadcast, which ended with Vote Blue, Go Green.

Suddenly, the campaign for the local elections is looking like a Hindu Festival of Colours as another colour, white this time seems to be so turned off mainstream politics they are about to vote for a party that is extreme about colour – the British National Party.

They are hardly representative of the Britain today, there is nothing national about their outlook, but I agree, they are a party.

Disinterested misrepresentation

This does not augur well for anyone, if our politics have become so juvenile that apathy and lethargy would offer yet another low turnout record.

We have definitely reached a point where democracy is failing us, when majorities are not so much about the majority of the populace that are eligible to vote but a majority of the minority that care to exercise their civil duties.

Representative democracy too seems only to matter at elections beyond which the elected seem to ignore the need for representative accountability till the next polling day.

Party politics rules even if it is not the party and policies you espouse.

Enough of the finger-painting

Politicians debating can be a sequel to the Comedy of Errors, but when it comes to leadership, governance and policies that really do matter, we deserve better than reds, hitting on blues with yellows looking on and whites running off as the lack of green brings our aching world to an end.

Enough of the preschool finger-painting exercises and let us move on to the grand work of art. [2]

References

[1] Blair resorts to cartoon jibes at Dave the chameleon – probably biased

[2] Hebrews 6:1 paraphrased and culled from the Message Bible