by WAJAHAT ALI
The fortress we built out of awareness was vulnerable to the insidious pull of whiteness
My 5-year-old daughter, Nusayba, twirled around in her princess dress, fixing her silver tiara and checking out her newly applied eye shadow and red lipstick in the bathroom mirror. Then she examined her beautiful, brown skin.
“I don’t like my skin colour,” she declared. “I wish my skin was lighter. It’s prettier.”
Her comment, about a month ago, was a gut punch. Up to that point, my wife and I were confident that we had protected our daughter from the curse of colorism, a toxic inheritance that still poisons our perceptions of self and beauty.
I grew up in a Pakistani immigrant home, where the obsession with pursuing light skin tone was as common as eating dal-chawal with our hands or hearing the adhan for prayer. An auntie at the birthday party would offer comments such as “She’s so beautiful, but, tragically, she is dark-skinned” or “For a girl with dark skin, she’s actually pretty.”
This brutal and gendered colour hierarchy is unleashed as soon as we exit the womb. Even babies aren’t spared. “Oh, so gora-chitta (white)! The parents are so lucky,” you’ll still hear in maternity wards from Fremont, Calif., to New Delhi.
My wife, Sarah, is a Pakistani American who played varsity tennis in the Florida heat, but she was always told by relatives, “Don’t play in the sun too long, or you’ll get too dark.” She resisted the colorism, but the comments still affected her.
Fascination with whiteness
At one point in college when visiting Pakistan, Sarah even bought a tube of Fair and Lovely, a skin-lightening cream that’s popular across South Asia. She told herself that she got it to help “even out her skin,” she told me later. (It was only last year that Unilever, which owns the lotion brand, removed references to “whitening” and “lightening” and renamed the product.)
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