"Ms. Muraleedharan had spotlighted the pockets of revanchism, colourism, and misogyny that festered unnoticed in Society" 💜

Entrenched Colourism | Deep-seated Colour Biases in Society

#newspaperinlearning

#today’snews 💜

Today’s Newspapers in English foregrounded a social malaise that’s been wreaking havoc on civil society for ages - the deep-seated colour biases in society, that result in value judgments based on one’s skin colour.

Well, I’ve highlighted some of the terms related to colourism in green, to foster better academic engagement with this social malady of our times - in our prospective debates, discussions and dialogues.

‘I am a woman and I am dark. It’s time I own both of these’

Times of India, dt 27th March 2025

Kerala chief secretary refuses to let a comment about her complexion slide, instead chooses to confront underlying biases and value judgments

It was a bold and daring call against colourism, by none other than the Chief Secretary of a State, when Sarada Muraleedharan fired back Wednesday at a remark about her skin colour, as it compared her tenure being “as black as her husband’s was white”. In a Facebook post, which she initially deleted but later reposted, she spoke out against deep-seated colour and gender biases in society.

The comment likened her administration to the colour black, while her predecessor and husband V Venu’s was called “white”.

Without naming the person behind the remark, Muraleedharan hinted at sexism in the criticism but refused to let the insult define her.

“I think it’s high time for me not to feel defensive about either the fact that I am a woman or that I am dark,” she said, according to news agency ANI. “It’s time that I own both of these and that I come out strongly. Maybe it will help those people who are going through similar feelings of insecurity and inadequacy to feel that we are worth it and we don’t need external validation.”

Taking to Facebook, she addressed the cultural fixation with fairness and shared a childhood memory of struggling with it. “As a four-year-old, I asked my mother whether she could put me back in her womb and bring me out again, all white and pretty,” she wrote.

“Behind the humour, there is an entire value connotation that black is not good, that there is something wrong with it,” she told ANI. “What is wrong about black? Isn’t it more a perception than a reality? It is important to claim blackness as something worthwhile and beautiful.”

Her response sparked a wave of support across political lines. Opposition leader VD Satheesan of Congress called her words “alarming” proof that even a high-ranking official isn’t immune to discrimination.

Kerala Chief Secretary sparks a social debate on ‘entrenched colourism’

The Hindu, dt 27th March 2025

Kerala Chief Secretary Sarada Muraleedharan has sparked a social debate on “entrenched colourism” in society.

In a powerful and poignant Facebook post on Wednesday, Ms. Muraleedharan highlighted the jarring inequity of skin tone bias against women in workplaces, hiring practices, professional evaluations, and the social arena.

Ms. Muraleedhran noted she was a victim of the entrenched prejudice against women of dark complexion and implied that being at the apex of the administration was no insulation against the bigotry. “I heard an interesting comment yesterday on my stewardship as the Chief Secretary – that it is as black as my husband’s (former Chief Secretary V. Venu) was white. Hmmm. I need to own my blackness,” she wrote.

Shades of misogyny

Ms. Muraleedharan also discerned shades of misogyny in the questionable attempt to draw a judgemental comparison between the respective public service careers of the IAS couple. “It was about being labelled black with that quiet subtext of being a woman as if that was something to be desperately ashamed of,” she noted.

At a stroke, Ms. Muraleedharan tapped into a wellspring of support in her public crusade against entrenched colourism. For one, the Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan said Ms. Muraleedharan had torn the veil over established colourism in Kerala society. “I am the child of a dark-skinned mother,” he noted.

Historian, social critic, and Professor at the Centre for Development Studies J. Devika said the provenance of discrimination against dark-skinned persons was a historical burden bequeathed to society by the country’s colonial past. “Not skin tone, but Ms. Muraleedharan’s life, character, and career defined her,” she said.

Actor Cuckoo Parameswaran stated, “Perceived blackness resides in the prejudiced eye of the beholder.” She said early hiring practices based on skin tone in the entertainment industry were on the wane.

Kerala State Youth Commission chairperson Chintha Jerome said Ms. Muraleedharan had spotlighted the pockets of revanchism, colourism, and misogyny that festered unnoticed in Kerala society. “The younger demographic is increasingly progressive,” she said.

Now coming back to our discussion on colourism, I would like to quote from two seminal books on the subject - 

Firstly, I’d like to quote from Rae Johnson’s article on the subject, titled, “Queering/Querying the Body: Sensation and Curiosity in Disrupting Body Norms”, from her book titled, Oppression and the Body: Roots, Resistance and Resolutions. Rae is a social worker, somatic movement therapist, and scholar/activist working at the intersections of embodiment and social justice.

Body Norms, Body Shame, and Social Power

It has been argued that the more marginalized and subordinated a social position we occupy, the more we are identified as bodies and the more pressure we experience to modify those bodies to reduce our deviance from the norm.

In other words, one way to enact oppression against members of a particular social group is to characterize them as bodily objects rather than intelligent and sentient subjects, and to simultaneously depict those bodies as uncivilized, crude, ugly, or distasteful.

As the multibillion-dollar cosmetics, plastic surgery, and weight-loss industries readily attest, women are prime subjects of such pressures to modify their bodies; however, members of other socially disempowered and vulnerable groups are hardly exempt.

The elderly are routinely encouraged to retain the appearance and functioning of their youth, as evidenced by an anti-aging products and services market expected to exceed $300 billion, while the effect of widespread and entrenched colorism supports a global market for skin-lightening products that is projected to reach $23 billion by 2017.

Of course, the cost of having a body considered substandard, deviant, or otherwise problematic cannot be measured in dollars alone. Body shame is a significant source of emotional and psychological distress, with consequences ranging from depression and diminished quality of life to social isolation and suicide.

For example, body objectification and dissatisfaction are increasingly prevalent among youth; a cross-sectional survey of Brazilian school children found a body dissatisfaction rate as high as 82 percent, with young girls at particular risk.

Given the fluidity, complexity, and contingency of bodily appearance and conduct in signifying social power and shaping identity, how do members of socially subordinated groups reclaim some authority over their body image in the process of liberation and empowerment?

As subjects whose very identities are (at least in part) socially constructed, how do we interrogate and illuminate the choices, compromises, and creative impulses to shape our body in particular ways?

How do we understand questions of agency and intent in the ongoing transformations of our body selves?

As we expand the range of our own bodily expressions to include representations that may have been prohibited or censured by the social worlds in which we live, how do we avoid the danger of advancing those counter-cultural expressions such that they become the new norms that others are expected to emulate? In exploring these questions, two analytic/methodological tools may be useful: queer theory and somatics, she avers.

Secondly, yet another important book on the subject by Carla Rice, titled, BECOMING WOMEN The Embodied Self in Image Culture, throws light on ‘Seeing Difference Differently’.

Carla Rice is Professor of Feminist Studies and Social Practice at the University of Guelph. She specialises in social justice, feminist studies, intersectionality, decolonizing, arts-based research, disability arts, fat studies, embodiment, and digital storytelling.

The book provides a highly nuanced approach to the colonisation of the woman’s body by beauty industries.

I quote -

In a culture where beauty is currency, women’s bodies are often per ceived as measures of value and worth. The search for visibility and self-acceptance can be daunting, especially for those on the margins of conventional Western notions of beauty. Becoming Women offers a thoughtful examination of the search for identity in an image-oriented world.

That search is told through the experiences of a group of women who came of age in the wake of second- and third-wave feminism, and focuses especially on voices from marginalized and misrepresented groups.

Carla Rice pairs images from popular culture with personal narratives to expose the “culture of contradiction” where exhortations for body acceptance have been matched by even more restrictive feminine image ideals and norms.

Drawing on insights gained from her advisory role with the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, Rice exposes the beauty industry’s colonization of women’s bodies, and examines why “the beauty myth” persists.

Seeing Difference Differently

Women marginalized in research and media reporting joined the dialogue because they wanted to re-vision conventional accounts and enrich understanding about the implications of difference.

Leigh hoped to fill a gap in popular magazines and studies that focused solely on white or American women: “Women’s magazines don’t cover diverse viewpoints. We need research relevant to the racial make-up of Canadians.”

Treated as marginal in feminist writing on beauty that addresses mainly white women’s issues, women of colour enrolled as a way of advocating for greater inclusion and representation –

“I was reading this feminist book and the person who had read it before me had written in the margins, ‘This is only a white woman’s point of view.’ So I’d like to give my perspective” (Rose). Even when books or articles stress experiences of Black or Asian women, authors still tend to take an ethnocentric approach by looking at issues primarily from a single group’s vantage point.

For multiracial women who see themselves as having many identities (being Black, Asian, and female, for example), the ethnocentric perspective is inadequate to capture the nuances of their embodiment: “I found books focusing on Caucasian or Black women only. I didn’t find books that understood women with multiracial back grounds. They weren’t relevant to me” (Ada).

Racialized women in this research did not see their concerns as identical to white women’s. (The term “racialized” refers the social process of viewing non-dominant racial groups according to pre-existing racial categories and stereotypes, which reproduces the categories as significant identities and sources of inequalities).

Many sought to move the conversation beyond size to include issues of hair and hue: “It wasn’t so much size, it was also colour. In my family, I’m lighter so kids at school would tease me. I realized then that people judged based on colour” (Sharon).

As a result of living in a country where citizens are imagined to be white and where other groups are divided into ethnic and racial silos, many confronted barriers to belonging that negatively affected their embodied being, she notes!

PS: You may want to listen to a Talk I had given on the subject of Trauma and Colourism, at Govt. Arts and Science College, Ollur, Kerala on 22nd November 2018. The topic of the Talk was, “Trauma, Epistemic Violence and the Archive”, HERE.