The Color War

Unfair and Lovely

Be Unfair Be Beautiful, is the latest campaign championed by Nandita Das on the internet and visual media. The inherent color prejudice in Indians is the driving force behind the thriving fairness products industry in the country and psychological fallouts of low self esteem, repression, self-hatred and meager opportunities in life. The tyranny of the past is a formidable force, but it is indeed surprising to know that the narrow domestic wall of color discrimination is a very modern phenomenon. In his book, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks, Frank M Snowden, best known for his study of blacks in classical antiquity, portrays the complete absence of virulent color prejudice in ancient societies of the Romans, Egyptians and the Greek. Science, religion and philosophy never differentiated people and picked on inferiors based on color. He insinuates that the trans-Atlantic slave trade needed a theory for its acceptance and perpetuation with the expanding imperialistic forays in different parts of the world. And, therefore, the belief translated into theory that human groups are born unequal with different colored skins. The colors black and white are not just skin pigmentations but have moral, ethnic and social connotations. The white is endowed with goodness, beauty and virtue and the black is evil, impure and ugly. According to Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate, the equation of white with virtue is the most pernicious, destructive ideas in the world….
Growing up, we read Roots by Alex Hailey, Don’t Walk in the Sun by Marita Golden, Color Purple by Alice Walker, To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison – literature which delineates the arduous journey of generations affected by the practices of colorism, shadism and racism. We are beautiful, but in comparison with someone else. The pre-requisite of being good and better requires another whom we can label as not so good. Discrimination is then a powerful tool of our ego and vanity, the service of which results in divisiveness, segregation, hatred and cruelty. The Blacker the Berry, Kiswana Brown and Reena are stories about women who come to accept their dark color and thereby swear to do good by their children by giving them a sense of self, their worth and importance as blacks: ‘the children must have their identities right from the beginning, no white dolls for them.’ The documentary Shadeism, portrays four women and their experiences in varied communities who have internalized their blackness and a four-year-old Tamilian girl perceives herself as ugly and a lesser mortal in comparison to a brown-skinned aunt. ‘Bleaching and fairness creams for the vagina carry the story to bizarre ends,’ says Nandita Das, culminating in an obsessive goal for an altogether whiteness of skin.
I have undertaken a project for English literature college students by doing book readings on novels in their syllabus. My last reading in August was based on Toni Morrison’s maiden work The Bluest Eye, a quest for blue eyes by a black female poor child named Pecola. She is born sweet with sparkling soft eyes and glowing black skin but her mother who has internalized the notion of black as ugly looks at her baby girl with self-hatred and disapproval. The Dick and Jane primer at her school exposes her to an ideal white American blue-eyed family, wherein love and laughter abounds between the family members and their pets. In contrast, her family lives their ugliness by fighting, abusing and maligning each other. Every billboard and movie that she watches plays images of blue-eyed fair-child stars and celebrities who, with their blonde hair, shining white skin and light eyes, are successful, happy and joyous people. Pecola tries to make herself disappear limb by limb, retracts her stomach and her entire persona. But however tightly she shuts her eyes, the images of distaste, alienation, misery and hatred in her life from her abusing, emotionally-impoverished parents, insensitive neighborhood, white adults and other bullish black children do not vanish. They are etched in her mind’s eye starkly and explicitly. Her desperate bid for blue eyes begins as a panacea for all evils in her world, and becomes an obsession. She devours the images of Shirley Temple dancing with Bill Robinson, Jane Marlow becomes her idol and she eats candies wrapped in caricatures of Mary Jane. She eats the candy to swallow Mary Jane, to become Mary Jane. Toni Morrison started writing at the peak of Black movement in America  in the late sixties, when blacks, after centuries of being told that they were enslaved because of their ugliness, woke up to the consciousness of Black is Beautiful. We are happy, beautiful, black and good, they said. Amidst the environment of a surging black individuality, Morrison wanted to chronicle the plight of a dark, female, poor Pecola, lest we forget the pain. The writing challenges the readers to ask themselves of the part played by them in society in making Pecola a pariah, a grounded bird who flaps her wings in a grotesque, futile effort to fly. She wrote a blues narrative for a regional black audience, but the truth in it rendered it universal. The book became a cult ‘cause it absolves all the characters in Pecola’s life of their roles in her lunacy and candidly brought out the question of complicity of the blacks themselves in their own subjugation. Morrison examines with an unblinking stare the perception of blacks who view themselves with a double consciousness, through the eyes of the white population, and internalize the amused contempt, pity the condemning gaze. In the process, they come to hate themselves and others like them and begin the quest for blue eyes.
 Prejudices are deeply entrenched in our psyche and however much we may think we are evolved and have overcome the discriminations, it requires an alert consciousness to reason out and fight the die cast by them. Mississippi Masala, a production by Mira Nair, is a tale of how prejudice makes victims and instigators (Roshan Seth perpetuates what he has been through himself) of us all. Regional literature does not sell, unless it is cast in the mould of a cosmopolitan avatar. Movies make it to the box office if they have an all white cast. Black characters can mingle with a white cast, but count how many of them survived to the end?  ‘Pointing out that black characters die in movies isn't even clever anymore -- it's the kind of obvious, trite joke that bad movies make about other bad movies. But, inexplicably, it keeps happening. Black characters end up in supporting roles, instead of being well-developed characters. They're just there, so we can judge the other (white) characters by how they treat them. But our open-mindedness usually stops at the point of actually paying to see a black leading man or woman. What's weirder is when the movie pretends to be about the triumph of a minority character, but instead spends all its time talking about the white people who save him. The black character is just a thing that needs to be taken care of, not an actual character – like maybe To Kill A Mocking Bird. So what’s the deal? Money. Once again, it's money. To get people in the theater seats, the story has to revolve around white people.
Again, we can blame the studios all we want. But they've learnt from hard experience that for the most part, if they don't play to our prejudices, we simply won't go see their movie!’
 Caste discrimination, religious bigotry and color prejudice is as immutable in India as in the rest of the world. Nandita Das, we have a long way to go!