June 2007 – Page 3

Neither fair nor lovely

I wrote the entire post – it took me two hours. I was so looking forward to putting it all up.

And then wordpress did not save the draft even though it said it had and it is lost forever. It was such a good post. It was such a well written post and it simply cannot be replicated. Nothing you’re about to read will be as good as what are now mere ashes floating in cyberspace.

It’s one of those days where this kind of thing makes me get so mad and then I just cry for 10 minutes and then it’s over.

So instead of finishing up my work at home this afternoon, I will be attempting to rewrite the post as well as trying not to mumble profanities while doing so.

I have spent nearly a month going back and forth between commenting on the New York Times article that was published regarding skin lightening creams in India. As a U.S. citizen and inhabitant of the First World/Global North, I find myself so weary of commenting on trends or situations of this kind that are taking place in the Global South/Third World/developing countries (from here on out I will be using the term developing countries). It’s very easy to get caught in the mindset that somehow, one’s education or upbringing or condition or geography grants the person some kind of right or privilege to decide what is best or appropriate for another community of people. It’s easy to get swept into the postmodern missionary system, where phrases like “helping” and “saving” become ways of further removing agency from those communities. Language is an important and influential thing. So I’m going to try very hard not to get caught up in deciding what is right or wrong about skin lightening in India, and focus on the argument that is being made about the companies that are making these creams. This is a complicated issue because it speaks volumes about the larger issues that are at play here – the media and advertising, sexism in the workplace, long histories of patriarchy, and globalization.

I will be referring to this article here – entitled “Telling India’s modern women they have power, even over their skin tone” – it is an archived article so I’m not sure if there will be full access to it. Maybe someone will find a link to the article on another website. For now I will be putting up small excerpts from the article in order to talk about a few things that I thought were a big problem.

“The modern Indian woman is independent, in charge — and does not have to live with her dark skin.

That is the message from a growing number of global cosmetics and skin care companies, which are expanding their product lines and advertising budgets in India to capitalize on growth in women’s disposable income. A common thread involves creams and soaps that are said to lighten skin tone. Often they are peddled with a ”power” message about taking charge or getting ahead.

Avon, L’Oréal, Ponds, Garnier, the Body Shop and Jolen are selling lightening products and all of them face stiff competition from a local giant, Fair and Lovely, a Unilever product that has dominated the market for decades.

Fair and Lovely, with packaging that shows a dark-skinned unhappy woman morphing into a light-skinned smiling one, once focused its advertising on the problems a dark-skinned woman might face finding romance. In a sign of the times, the company’s ads now show lighter skin conferring a different advantage: helping a woman land a job normally held by men, like announcer at cricket matches. ”Fair and Lovely: The Power of Beauty,” is the tagline on the company’s newest ad”

Fair and Lovely’s advertising has always been targeted to dark skinned and often working class women who should lighten their skin if they want that promotion, or a job, or respect, or a husband. You might YouTube some advertisements of the company – they often depict women who are shunned by some high power executive or modeling agency or studio run by Western-clothes-wearing-light-skinned-Indian folk. Then they go back to their homes and use the cream and transform into similar looking W.c.w.l.s.I.f and everyone is so taken aback at how good they look and then they look so happy and youthful now that they have new skin. The problem goes beyond the issue of telling women that they can obtain lighter skin and invoke more opportunities – the problem is that this company is reflecting companies and workplaces that do in fact discriminate against women who have darker skin, or are not from global cities like Bombay or Delhi. Before I go on, I will say that this is not an exclusive characteristic of developing countries – the U.S. still, albeit not necessarily as overtly, privileges certain women over others in the job market and in everyday situations and discriminate based on gender (how much do you look like a woman), color, race, age, sexuality and class (where did you go to school, what kind of education have you pursued, etc.). The advertising for products like Fair and Lovely (and for newer lightening creams made by L’oreal – called White Perfect – big sirens going off in my head about that) continues to enforce certain color and regional and class related prejudices in communities.

Here’s the thing that I really want to get into though.

“‘Half of the skin care market in India is fairness creams,” said Didier Villanueva, country manager for L’Oréal India, and 60 to 65 percent of Indian women use these products daily. L’Oréal entered this specific market four years ago with Garnier and L’Oréal products, but so far has a small market share, he said.

The idea of ”glowing fairness” has nothing to do with colonialism, or idealization of European looks, Mr. Villanueva said. ”It’s as old as India,” he said, and ”deeply rooted in the culture.”

There’s no denying that the notion of ”fairness,” as light skin is known in India, is heavily ingrained in the culture. Nearly all of Bollywood’s top actresses have quite pale skin, despite the range of skin tones in India’s population of more than a billion people.”

Fairness has nothing to do with colonialism or the idealization of European looks?? Oh Mr. Villanueva, what a silly man you are. Because what you should have reminded the large population of people who read the New York Times and use quotes from authentic Indians as facts about the entire Indian population is that while fairness, i.e. light skin, has indeed been privileged in Indian culture for years before British colonization, it doesn’t mean colonialism didn’t reinforce the power of white skin.

I remember extended family members always reminding me of the many things that can apparently make you dark – don’t be out in the sun too long. Don’t drink so much tea (did anybody get that one?) it will make your skin dark. I had the feeling that everything that young girls weren’t supposed to do was rooted to dark skin. Dark skin, at least for North Indian communities, meant you worked in the sun. Maybe you couldn’t afford servants. It meant you were poor or working class. But if anybody thinks that privileging white skin didn’t get reinforced by white folk coming to India and taking over the entire nation, then I’m going to go as far as to say maybe they’re in a bit of denial. Because with the white skin of Britain came whiteness and white privilege and those things become very tied together. So while fairness doesn’t have everything to do with colonialism or whiteness, it sure as hell as something to do with it.

I read some comments floating around the internet, and on the Sephora blog, that compares skin lightening in India to tanning in the U.S. This is a very interesting comparison to me, because from the outside it appears to be a valid one. But I’m going to argue that it isn’t and here’s why in a nutshell: when white people tan, they aren’t stripping themselves of any kind of white privilege that they have – I understand that there is a stigma about white people being considered “pasty and unattractive” but tanning does not strip white people from the privileges that they benefit from because of their race. In fact, tanning is a way of benefiting from the exotic-ness and trendy appeal that comes from dark skin without the racism and colorism that many if not most people of color face in their day to day lives. Lightening one’s skin strips brown folk of oppressions that they will encounter based on the way they look. Tanning is a luxury. Skin lightening is a process that is created out of the institutions that tell women (and men) that it is a product of survival. Big. Difference.

I’m going to end on this final reinforcement – this is a complex issue. Not because skin lightening creams are a big issue – education is an issue. Poverty is an issue. Patriarchy is an issue. And they are issues everywhere. Skin lightening creams, and that NY Times article, is an issue because it is a testament to these larger issues. It is a lens through which issues of race and color and gender need to be challenged and talked about. It is a portal through which whiteness and patriarchy and media can be discussed.

Now I am going to save this post in three different programs and proofread and publish it.

Crossposted at Women of (An)other Color

Rapist coddled because his victim “didn’t look 10”

The judge thinks she looked 16 and she was wearing a frilly bra and a thong, so raping her ain’t no big thing. This is the same judge who apparently ordered a pedophile to buy his victim a new bicycle. The article, in its entirety:

A JUDGE spared a man who raped a girl of ten in a park — because she wore a “provocative” frilly bra and thong.

Window cleaner Keith Fenn, 25 — who could have got life in jail — will be free in just FOUR MONTHS after admitting twice having sex with the child.

Judge Julian Hall decided to be lenient because the girl “didn’t look 10”.

He caused fury earlier this year by freeing another paedophile, telling him to buy his six-year-old victim a new bicycle.

The judge referred to the 10-year-old as a “young woman”, and called her “very disturbed, very needy and sexually precocious”.

He told Oxford Crown Court: “She liked to dress provocatively. She was 10. She’d been in care since she was four.

“Did she look 10? Certainly not. She looked 16.”

Fenn, of Oxford, got two years’ jail but will soon be free because of time spent awaiting sentence. Accomplice Darren Wright, 34, of Henley-on-Thames walked free after getting just nine months.

Last night, campaigner Dr Michele Elliott of children’s charity Kidscape called the sentences “beyond pathetic”.

The NSPCC added: “There’s no excuse.”

Perhaps Emperor Misha is his alter-ego?

The good news is that there’s an investigation into the leniency of this sentence. Disturbingly, this isn’t the first time a sexual predator has gotten off lightly:

In 113 cases, the sentence was judged to be unduly lenient and in 108 cases it was increased. This number was the highest in the last six years.

Sentences were increased in seven murder cases, seven manslaughters, 24 cases involving sex abuse, 20 robberies, seven firearms crimes, 18 drugs offences and six deaths by dangerous driving.

Judges dealing with sexual offenders were most likely to let offenders off too lightly, the figures revealed.

Shocking.

Baby-killer, angry about baby-killing, kills baby.

A man accused of killing his girlfriend’s toddler because he was mad at the child’s mother for having an abortion has been sentenced to life in prison.

Really.

This is incredibly sad, but certainly not surprising. The anti-choice mentality is centered on the idea that women’s bodies are the property of their closest male family member, that women should be punished for sexual activity, and that the state should have the right to force women to continue their pregnancies. This woman had an abortion after her boyfriend told her not to. He punished her by killing someone she loved.

The kicker? She’s being prosecuted, too:

Haslett had been dating Gavin’s mother, Jennifer L. Harvey. She pleaded guilty in April to felony child endangerment after admitting she suspected that Haslett had been abusing Gavin but allowed him to continue caring for the toddler. She will be sentenced June 22.

The article doesn’t say whether or not Joseph Haslett (the murderer) was abusing Jennifer Harvey, but it seems like this all indicates a pretty clear pattern of intimate violence. Abusers are known to harm or kill their partner’s pets as a warning, and they certainly threaten their partner’s children as a way of maintaining control. If Harvey wasn’t being abused and was recklessly leaving her child with a man she thought was abusing him, then she certainly deserves to face the legal consequences. But I have a feeling that there’s more to this story.

Prosecuting Neo-Natal Drug Use: A Public Health Issue

Theresa Lee Hernandez is being prosecuted for murder — for being a drug addict and giving birth to a stillborn baby.

The District Attorney is arguing that Hernandez’s neo-natal methamphetamine use amounts to murdering her child. Obviously no one thinks that neo-natal drug use is a good thing, but prosecuting addicts who use drugs throughout their pregnancies is a pretty poor idea. It’s questionable from a legal standpoint, and it’s even more problematic from a public health perspective — if drug users know that they may be tried for child abuse, they aren’t going to seek out basics like pre-natal care or substance abuse treatment. And many drug treatment centers don’t accept pregnant women or women with children, making it difficult for them to get help. From National Advocates for Pregnant Women:

Drug dependency is a medical condition – not a crime. Pregnant women do not experience alcoholism and other drug dependencies because they want to harm their fetuses or because they don’t care about their children.

Like other chronic medical conditions, drug dependency can be controlled and overcome through medical treatment. Medical knowledge about addiction and dependency treatment demonstrates that the majority of dependent people do not, and cannot, simply stop their drug use as a result of threats of arrest or other negative consequences. In fact, threat-based approaches do not protect children. They have been shown to deter pregnant and parenting women not from using drugs, but from seeking prenatal care and drug and alcohol treatment.

Health risks to women, fetuses, and children whether from poverty, inadequate nutrition, exposure to alcohol, drugs, or other factors can be mitigated through prenatal care, counseling, and continued medical supervision. For this to be effective, however, the patient must trust her health care provider to safeguard her confidences and stand by her while she attempts to improve her health (even when those efforts are not always successful). Converting the physician’s exam room into an interrogation chamber and turning health care professionals into agents of law enforcement destroys this trust.

Unfortunately many women in Oklahoma find it difficult to obtain the help they need to overcome their alcohol and drug dependency problems. In fact, according to the federal government’s drug treatment facility locator there are no residential treatment programs designed to meet the needs of pregnant and parenting women – or even women in general — within 100 miles of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Arresting people with drug related problems not only deters them from seeking help – it is likely to deter others from offering compassion and providing the resources necessary to develop and fund the kinds of treatment that we know can help pregnant women and their families.

I’ll also note that the women tried for child abuse, drug trafficking and murder after their neo-natal drug addiction are almost always women of color — in one study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, white women and black women were found to use drugs during pregnancy at the same rates, but black women were ten times more likely to be reported to authorities.

Prosecuting neo-natal drug use is problematic law and terrible public policy. Hopefully Oklahoma will recognize that it might be worth putting its resources toward a drug treatment facility rather than putting this woman in jail.

At least there’s New Mexico.

Thanks to Nancy for the link, and a big cheer for NAPW for all the amazing work they do.

I’m not blaming the victim, I’m just saying that the stupid whore deserved it

Ah, values.

A pregnant woman is brutally murdered by the father of her children, and all some “conservative values” bloggers have to say about it is, I’m not saying she deserved it, but she pretty much deserved it. First, Dan Riehl:

Any murder is tragic; the murder of a pregnant woman is even more so. And nothing should distract from an expedient investigation and prosecution, or fail to appreciate the family’s profound suffering because of this crime. Unfortunately, if this is what constitutes crime in the heartland of America, that heart is very sick and we can only expect more of the same.

(Emphasis mine)
Yes, you read that right — Dan does appear to be saying that it’s unfortunate that the murder of a pregnant woman constitutes a crime in the Heartland.

I’ve no desire to insult the victim or her family and no one should. But the sad reality is that Jessie Davis was either the victim of poor self, or impulse control and poor decision-making, perhaps both, long before she became a murder victim. And to suggest that one isn’t in any way related to another only endorses the notion that values don’t matter. They do. And while Ms. Davis certainly isn’t in any way directly responsible for her own death, had she been a bit more responsible with her life, it likely wouldn’t have ended in such a tragic crime.

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The Wedding, culture, and my Indian identity

It’s really difficult for me to write these days. I’ve just come back from a 3 day wedding – a wedding filled with firsts: my first Indian wedding (this was a North Indian wedding), the first family wedding I’ve attended (my cousin), and the first event where I have had to be around family, fully decked out in North Indian clothes and seen as an adult.

A lot of life is about performance, I’ve come to realize. It’s all about those little details that keep family from getting caught in arguments – what I refer to as “family politics” – a fake laugh, keeping your mouth shut when your elders tell you that you’ve gained weight, learning not to distinguish “art college” from “liberal arts college” when they attempt to belittle your choice in pursuing the humanities. At a certain point, whether I intend to or not, I find my eyes move slightly down, my walk becomes a little slower and my voice is heard considerably less when I’m at family events (hereby referred to as “functions”). These things all come down to the gender roles that have been assigned to me through a variety of things – little comments that were made to me as a child by extended family, the media. And the particularities of these gender roles are dictated by my family’s culture.

I have a long history with resisting culture. I was sitting at the henna-ceremony, looking around at the one of 40 women that had attended the event who was around my age. The first was 23. And married. Her hair was perfectly straight and her outfit was perfectly tailored and her husband was an attractive and wealthy South Asian man. She looked like an Indian Barbie doll. She looked domesticated and manicured and feminine – and to be honest, it doesn’t matter whether she is reading Sister Outsider under her covers with a flashlight while her husband is asleep or not. What matters is her performance – her ability to fit a model that is dictated by a culture that I cannot relate to.

My claim is this: I don’t know if I ever will feel connected to my identity as an Indian-American because of culture. Culture is not the thing that dictates my struggle for social justice. The reality is, the aspects of “Indianness” that make me feel like an Indian-American is the solidarity I share with other Indian-Americans regarding racism, sexism and homophobia in and outside of the community. It is often a shared experience my family has with other South Asian families that immigrate to the United States. It is the brown color of my skin that I have grown to love that helps me to identify as Indian-American. It is my parents. My grandparents. My aunt.

There is more to say, but it will have to wait.

Cross-posted at Woman of (An)other Color

“What kind of idea are you?

Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cursed, bloody-minded ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – the kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but the hundredth time, will change the world?”
-Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie’s upcoming knighting has reignited the extremist voices that called for his murder back when The Satanic Verses came out. While there are a lot of things to dislike about the above-linked editorial, I’m with Ash when he writes:

The issue here is not whether Rushdie’s writing merits a knighthood or whether left-wing, cosmopolitan writers should accept honors from her majesty. (My answers are “yes,” and “why not?” but that’s by the way.)

The issue is whether people should be killed, or need to be protected from a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write. And whether a sovereign, democratic state should censor its recognition of its own citizens in the face of such intimidation.

He doesn’t propose what we should (or even can) do about the people who put a reward on Rushdie’s head. And while I agree with him that Rushdie’s life shouldn’t be threatened, no matter how offensive his book,* Ash loses me when he starts finger-wagging at Muslims:

American Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously observed that a man should not be free to shout a false alarm of “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Now, the fact is that even if a secular liberal intellectual were to say, “Mad Mullah X deserves to be shot,” the likelihood that someone would go out and shoot Mullah X as a result is close to zero. There are no al-Darwinia brigades practicing bomb making in secret laboratories, awaiting an order from their beloved imam Richard Dawkins to assassinate Mullah X.

If, however, a Muslim cleric or intellectual says, “Salman Rushdie deserves to be shot,” there are people out there who may take it literally. Remember that Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator was stabbed and his Norwegian publisher attacked because Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had called for everyone involved in propagating “The Satanic Verses” to be punished. Because of this explosive context, Muslim speakers need to exercise a particular care in their choice of words.

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Tricky Dick Deuce

Dick Cheney is an even worse person than you thought — and he’s trying to establish some dangerous Constitutional standards.

On Thursday, Mr. Waxman revealed that after four years of refusing to cooperate with the government unit that oversees classified documents, the vice president tried to shut down the unit rather than comply with the law ensuring that sensitive data is protected. The National Archives appealed to the Justice Department, but who knows how much justice there is at Justice, now that the White House has so blatantly politicized it?

Cheney’s office denied doing anything wrong, but Cheney’s office is also denying it’s an office. Tricky Dick Deuce declared himself exempt from a rule that applies to everyone else in the executive branch, instructing the National Archives that the Office of the Vice President is not an “entity within the executive branch” and therefore is not subject to presidential executive orders.

Cheney essentially wants to make his position Constitutionally unregulated. I probably don’t have to explain why that’s a bad thing, but in case it’s not clear, it would allow Cheney (and potentially any VP who comes after him) to act outside of executive authority and without oversight.

And he has a pretty scary guy working on the legal end of things — David Addington, a long-time colleague and one of the primary authors of the now-infamous torture memo (you know, the one that said the War on Terror made previous international human rights law obsolete, and backed the military in using physically and psychologically damaging interrogation methods, up until the point of organ failure).

This New Yorker article is the best piece I’ve read so far on David Addington. Unfortunately, the whole thing isn’t online, but I happened to have a copy in email form which I’ve copied and pasted below the fold. It’s very long, but I promise it’s well worth the read — and it adds some important context to Cheney’s current legal shenanigans.

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My friends from school are meeting my friends from camp!

So I belong to a few livejournal ftm communities. I still hang out in them, albeit much less frequently. A few people from those spaces have shown up here, and some stuff I’ve written here has actually been reposted over there. (Always welcome, all of you, and thanks so much for the publicity, feedback, and appendices over there.)

There have been a great many really interesting discussions over there over the past few years: passing, partnering, parenting, visibility, “stealth” practice and theory, the ins and outs and wherefores of transition, in-group distinctions, family dynamics, generational differences, etc. I’ve been wary of linking to them because those spaces are a little different from this one.

They’re not only a space for long, involved discussions of gender politics that turn into vicious flame wars. They’re also a really valuable place to obtain information and support. For some members, they’re pretty much all that’s available; they don’t have any choice but to trust the evil internets (tm Analee Newitz) with their stories. Some of the questions concern very private things, and the people asking them are not members of this community. So far as I can tell, the livejournal communities have been largely free of gawking asshats–at least, the ones who announce themselves. This privacy is as fragile and illusory as that enjoyed by a topless femme at the Dyke March, but it’s something I feel like I should maintain rather than compromise.

But now people are ending up here, which is awesome.

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Project Guest Blogger – Week Five

A big thanks to Flea and Bint for guest-blogging this week. They were as fantastic as expected, and I hope everyone will check out their blogs regularly.

Project Guest Blogger is moving along this week with posts from One Brown Woman and another guest-blogger who will hopefully be announced later today (in other words, I messed up the scheduling, but will hopefully fix it soon). I’m looking forward to another great week!