Skin Care

I'm a Light-Skinned Chinese Woman, and I Experience Pretty Privilege

"It feels like being suddenly submerged."

As a person of color living in Canada, there are two things that I am far too used to hearing from new acquaintances. First, total strangers will ask me where I’m from (no, where I’m really from). Then, they’ll comment on the fairness of my skin.

I’m a pretty curious person, so when I hear an opinion that sounds like it might be related to my skin tone, I’ll ask the person who said it to explain where their comments are coming from. (No, where their comments are really coming from.) And every time, no matter the race or age or gender of the commenter, I hear a variation on the same thing: it’s because you’re pale for a person of color, and I think that makes you pretty.

Here’s the thing. Calling someone beautiful is awesome. If you have the kind of relationship with someone where it’s appropriate for you to compliment their looks, go for it! Remind them that they’re wonderful and beautiful and unique! But before you tell them they’re beautiful, ask yourself: Am I giving this person a compliment that’s going to make them feel enriched, or am I fetishizing a part of their body? Because I can tell you firsthand that being told you’re pretty because you don’t look like “most people” of your race doesn’t feel flattering. It feels like being suddenly submerged in a pool of ice-cold water, every single time.

I'm a light-skinned Chinese woman, and my fair skin is often the first thing people see about me. Whether in a job interview or on a first date, I experience something called “color privilege,” wherein I’m more likely to be afforded the benefits of being coded by others as white or white-passing than darker-skinned members of my race. This phenomenon is called colorism, a term coined by Alice Walker in 1982. Colorism is described as the tendency of society to assign individuals to a racial category based on the color of their skin; in other words, for many POC, the lighter your skin is, the more opportunities become available to you.

Colorism is handled differently by each culture, and I experience it most prominently when I travel to China. Fair skin is so prized in some Asian cultures (including China, Korea, and Japan) that strangers will follow me for blocks, staring, or they’ll get visibly upset when I’m outdoors and not hiding under an umbrella. That’s not an exaggeration – when I visited China this past May, a woman came up to me in the street and shaded my exposed skin with her own hat and arms while scolding my mother for not bringing an umbrella to preserve the whiteness of my skin. (She stuck by us for almost a half hour until we headed to another location, and unfortunately, it was far from the first time that something like that had happened to me overseas.)

In places like Asia, colorism exists more as a status symbol than a racial one. Pale skin was seen in ancient China as a signifier of being able to stay indoors during the daytime rather than being outside working, and a pale complexion became synonymous with nobility and wealth in Chinese culture. The paler you are in most of Asia, the more socieconomic currency is afforded to you based off of your looks.

In Canada, however, colorism's roots come back to that idea of looking white or white-passing. It's experienced differently in each community, and where I live, there's a lot of resentment toward people who look "less white." Instead of existing as a cultural pressure to look like you belong to a certain socioeconomic class, colorism here exists as a pressure to look like you belong to a certain racial group – or as close to it as possible. My darker-skinned Chinese friends and family experience more microaggressions and racial profiling than I ever have, and it's made schooling and looking for work harder for them. I have mixed-race cousins who have taken their Caucasian parent's last name in order to pass as white in interviews, and POC friends with dark summer tans who have been stopped and checked by law enforcement officers in their own communities because they "looked out of place."

But Eastern and Western cultures have capitalized on the colorism in different ways, perhaps because its origins are so different in each. In Canada, there's that emphasis on "passing" – whether that means lightening your appearance or changing your last name. In Asia, however, a culture of skin lightening has arisen in the face of colorism.

Skin lighteners are extremely prevalent in Asian countries today, although they have historical roots going back to the Elizabethan age. Lightening and brightening products also exist in North America, but they're usually marketed as short-term aids for evening out hyperpigmentation or scarring – whereas in Asia, they're marketed as a lifestyle. The rhetoric behind safe-for-use skin brighteners is often just as problematic as the marketing behind harsh skin lighteners, and encourages users to lighten their skin tones indefinitely in order to gain access to more color privilege. It's tough to go more than two blocks in China without seeing an ad featuring a super-fair model promoting products with names like Olay White Radiance, Garnier White Complete, and Pond’s White Beauty. And in the subtext of each of these ads, the idea that having whiter skin will improve your life is reinforced.

But here's the problem with colorism-based marketing. If it posits that "whiter is better," then it's also propagating the inverse as true: that "darker is worse." And it's not. There is nothing about having darker skin that makes you less competent, beautiful, or amazing, and as consumers, we have the power to challenge those beliefs. Instead of making judgements based on skin color, we could be raising questions about colorism in our daily lives, and encouraging brands to take a more inclusive approach to their marketing.

Whether I'm in Canada or in China, I hear an echo every time my fair skin is complimented. There's always an implication that someone else's dark skin is being simultaneously policed, knowingly or not. My echo has always been my sister, whose skin was a beautiful, buttery tan color growing up – making her look significantly more "ethnic" than I did. Whenever one of our aunties, friends, or acquaintances saw us together and complimented my fair skin, they were also tacitly implying that because her skin was darker, she was less notable. Their actions implied that her skin tone wasn't worth commenting on, and gave her a value based solely on her appearance – which isn't the reality that I want to live in.

So don't tell me that I'm beautiful because I don't look like other Chinese people, and don't tell her that she should look more like me. Instead, get to know us. We're more than just what you can see.

Photo Courtesy of Instagram/@thenotice.

Related: Hollywood's Colorism Problem Can't Be Ignored Any Longer

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