Being Brown

So I’m brown. I see that this is a Big Issue for women of my heritage. It was for me until I reached my teens, and then I suddenly stopped caring. I think part of the reason why I stopped might have been that my brother, who was more light-skinned than me growing up, somehow became darker. My sister is lighter-skinned, but I’m prettier, so the sibling rivalry balanced out. (What a mean thing to say. But what the hell — my sister refuses to give me the time of day, so whatever.)

I notice that a lot of desi (South Asian) girl bloggers dislike how Aishwariya Rai is taken for an Indian beauty. Supposedly, because she doesn’t have black eyes, and has lighter skin and fine features, she’s not a typical Indian, whatever that may be in such a diverse country, let alone the whole subcontinent.

Aside from the colored eyes, Rai looks Indian to me. I think a lot of Pakistanis, for instance, (including myself) would look white if we had lighter skin. I.e., there isn’t much difference of feature. Many Indians have distinctive kinky hair and many Indian girls have, um, disproportionately big noses, but many have fine straight hair (like me) and small noses (like Rai, who looks remarkably like a cousin of mine).

I’m definitely able to pick Indians out of a crowd of Mexicans and other assorted brown people, and I certainly get taken for an Indian a lot more often than people mistake me for Mexican, Arab, Iranian, Italian (yes), French (I know!), etc. Mostly, they think I’m Indian, and they’re pretty much right. How can they tell? And would they be able to tell with Rai, if she wasn’t so famous? I think, really, it’s the distinctive brown of the South Asian skin. It’s not quite brown — there’s a sickly yellowish tinge to it. I’m a rosier brown because of spending time in the sun but the yellowish tinge returns after a few days spent indoors.

There are many pretty-close-to-white people in Pakistan, and they don’t ‘look’ Pakistani in the same sense that Rai doesn’t look Indian — they’re not unambiguously brown.

True, the vast majority of South Asians are dark. It’s a huge postcolonial complex — or maybe it has nothing to do with colonialism. I remember a conversation between a dark-skinned Bengali girl and a fairly light-skinned Arab girl about ubton, a powder (mixed with rose water or milk) used by South Asian women to lighten their skin. The Saudi girl — who looked white anyway — immediately wanted to know how she could get this stuff. So it may not be white people’s fault that we so desperately want to look like them. Even Mexicans, I notice, use light-skinned women in their soap-operas. Don’t ask me how I know about Mexican soap operas.

As a child, I was hugely insecure about everything about myself. I stuck a clothes-pin on the end of my nose to make it thinner. I used a coating of baby powder on my face to appear whiter. It must have looked gruesome – thank heaven I don’t have any pictures from that time. I was smart enough to read about the dangers of skin-lightening creams like Fair and Lovely so I never used those, but I must admit I was tempted.

The reason for this huge continent-wide complex is, people simply prize lighter skin, presumably because it’s relatively rarer. In a continent of more than a billion people, of course a significant number aren’t dark — but most of them are. In women, especially, it’s considered — by itself — a mark of beauty. Some darker girls like myself (although I’m not considered “unacceptably dark”) are accepted as cute because of other redeeming features (fine features, good hair). Another couple of shades darker than me, and you’re fucked. Or rather, NOT fucked, as no one will want to marry you.

It’s also a class thing. I don’t know exactly how it happens, but women of the upper classes in Pakistan are almost uniformly lighter-skinned than the middle or lower middle classes. I think this may be because (wild guess) the richer boys get the lighter-skinned girls (as marriages are arranged and the chief items under consideration are the man’s wealth and the woman’s looks). Of course there is some variation, but on the whole, this holds true in Pakistan. Naturally then, being of dark skin stigmatizes you as a lower-class person, and remember, Pakistan is a very classist society. (If you’re an American and think America is classist, I laugh at you.)

I’d gotten over the whole skin color issue long before I moved to the U.S., but I must say I LOVE being brown here — so exotic! Sometimes, rarely, in a room-full of white-white WASPy people, I feel Brown and out of place. But it’s rare. Racism and marginalization? Don’t happen. I know, I’m fortunate — it’s more a function of living in Cali, I suppose, than American tolerance (must say, Americans are fairly tolerant, by and large, much more so than many European countries).

Let me tell you — being dark in Pakistan is much worse than being brown here. Ironic, but true.