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.
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