Love the skin you’re in? Is it possible to be black and beautiful in today’s society?



In this feature Black Britain continues the debate on skin bleaching within our communities looking in greater depth at the historical, cultural, social and psychological reasons why some people are just not happy with the skin they’re in.



Where does the desire to be white stem from?



 Supermodel Alek Wek's dark skin and striking physical features are seen as assets that have contributed to the success her of career, proving that black can be regarded as beautiful in today's society.

 From a young age we are taught to worship all things white and beautiful, so therefore anything black isn’t beautiful or desirable



Dr Lez Henry, sociologist



The Health Hazards of Skin Bleaching

Historical Legacies based on religion



According to sociologist Dr Lez Henry, who appeared in Dami Akinnusi’s documentary: Bleach My Skin White, part of the desire to have a whiter skin stems from a desire to be nearer to God. He told Black Britain:



“From a young age we are taught to worship all things white and beautiful, so therefore anything black isn’t beautiful or desirable.



We are also taught that anyone in a position of real power is white, God is white, and Jesus is white.”



He describes such ideologies as Eurocentric and ethnocentric, because it puts Caucasians, as an ethnic group at the centre of everything.



“European standards and norms are the yardstick to measure everything, both good and bad.”



Dr Henry referred to Hinduism, the religion based on a caste system whereby the darker your skin is the more cursed you are. He said:



“According to the religion, you are not just cursed and damned in this life; you are cursed and damned for all eternity, for being black.”



However, this belief system was given to Hinduism by the Aryans who were a tribe who moved into the Indus valley in India some time between 1750 to 1200 BCE from areas surrounding Russia and the Baltic.



They introduced the varna system which is believed to be how Hinduism came to be based on the caste system.



The name Aryan means noble and therefore when the Aryans came to India they established a class structure whereby they placed themselves at the top of it and others below them.



Therefore the belief among Asians that it is more desirable to be a lighter complexion is based on the belief that this conveys a superior status in society.



“So this has a historical legacy [for Asian people] but for us [black people] it is slightly different”, said Dr Henry.



“During slavery, as Africans we were socialised into accepting that everything white was virtuous, true, honest, master and mistress.”



The images of Africans as negative were communicated to slaves through the Bible, using certain scriptures to tell them that they were savages.



Dr Henry told Black Britain: “It wasn’t by chance that all of a sudden Europeans were telling us that Africans are savages.”



This was written into European books and written into European vocabularies:



“They designed that to place us on the bottom rung of the ladder and themselves on top.”



The reason why these ideologies continue to pervade society is because “nothing has been put in place for white people do deal with their own racism and that system of white supremacy”, Dr Henry said.



Dr Henry refers to these ideologies as “systems of power” which exist “without black people realising that they are being socialised and educated away from themselves.



This is about socialising people to believe that they are inferior. Our society teaches you to hate and not to trust anything that looks like you if you are not white.”



Social and psychological factors



 If you are someone with low self esteem who has experienced adversity in your life then you are more likely to look at external factors to explain your problems, such as the shade of your skin.





Dr Dele Olajide is a Consultant Psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust who also appeared in Bleach My Skin White.



He told Black Britain that the majority of people who bleach their skin are women. However, it is not just black women from the UK but from south-east Asia, Japan, the Middle East, the African continent, the Caribbean, south and North America.



In other words, what we have is a world wide phenomenon of people who are not happy with the skin they are in. Dr Olajide told Black Britain:



“The people who bleach are people of colour who do so because the role model projected, the ideal women who are projected onto our TV screens are light-skinned women.”



Among the Indian population, women say that they lighten their skin because if they are dark it doesn’t make them feel sexually attractive, it doesn’t increase their dowry and they are mistaken as being lower class.



Women are kept at home when they are young to keep them from too much exposure to the sun so they don’t get too dark.



This is well known among Asians although it is not openly discussed. Among Arab women plastic surgery is common as Middle-eastern women are restructuring their noses to look more European. Dr Olajide told Black Britain:



“When you look at how we, as black people have been colonized and enslaved, over the years the value of the subjugated is to aspire towards the master group.”



Therefore people of African descent are more likely to feel that white culture is superior to everything black, because that is what has been pumped into them since very early on in childhood.



A major disadvantage to black culture has been the lack of written African history, according to Dr Olajide.



Most African history is mainly oral and therefore most of the stories known about African history are recent and based on the media and what white people have written about black culture:



“So basically history tells us that Africans are primitive and white people are civilized.”



Dr Olajide told Black Britain that in his opinion as a psychiatrist, the people most likely to bleach are the more vulnerable members of our communities:



“The more fragile your ego is, the more likely you are to have low self-esteem and the more likely you are to aspire to the attributes of the superior race.



Those of us who are not strong emotionally tend to believe that. This is conditioned from a very early age.”



In America an experiment was carried out whereby black children were asked to choose between pink toys and black toys at the age of five and 70 per cent of the children picked pink toys.



Dr Olajide said: “Black children picked pink toys because that is what they believed is a better colour to be, not black.”



He said unless a child has a strong family to nurture them and give them confidence in themselves as a black person, there is a risk of falling victim to external mediums that portray black people in a negative light.



Commenting on the portrayal of black women in music videos Dr Olajide claims that darker skinned women are given the type of roles that flaunt their sexuality, perpetuating the stereotype that darker skinned women are sexual beasts. He asserts that the lighter skinned women are given more graceful roles.



Dr Olajide stated that as people tend not to watch television programmes critically and analytically they fail to notice that generally the media tends to perpetuate the same stereotypes over the years:



“Black men are aggressive, virile and always ready and they are only objects of desire because they are studs. They are not intelligent.”



White men are portrayed as cerebral and intellectual but black men can be as wild as possible.



With black women, the darker they are the more they are seen as wild. There is no question of dignity. We have bought into this even as black people ourselves.”




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