Colorism: A Race Dimension in Peru

/

By Enrique Delgado Ramos

I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss in this space the specific characteristics of colorism in a multicultural and multiracial south American country such as Peru. Racism in Peru includes what has been called colorism but in an inseparable relationship with other phenotypic traits, as well as cultural and economic characteristics.  As Dixon and Telles (2017, p.406) have reported, in Latin America racism and colorism are overlapped unlike, for example, the research in USA where “colorism has developed as a concept separate from racism”.

Generally speaking, in Peru racism includes three interrelated dimensions: cultural, economic and phenotypic. The phenotypic dimension includes color of skin, color and shape of hair (wavy or Lazio), the shape of the nose (the aquiline nose is characteristic of indigenous traits) among other aspects. The phenotypic characteristics of the white population are the most valued even if they are in the minority population. In the same vein, the cultural manifestations associated with the western culture are those that have higher status. Traditionally, white people have had greater purchasing power, even though this has changed in the last decades.

It is important to note that these dimensions are relational. Hence, the same person may be considered more white, brown or black not only by skin color but also based on customs, ways of talking, ways of dressing, signs of wealth, educational degree, among other aspects.  Hence, colorism may function as within-group discrimination but also as inter group discrimination and may be influenced by the cultural and economics characteristics. The least “brown” of a group can treat other members in a derogatory way. In the same way, the least "cholo" (social category that refers to a person with Andean physical and cultural traits) can discriminate others because of their physical traits or their customs. But this person will be in turn discriminated by others “less cholos”.

So, in Peru the hierarchy put on the top white and not indigenous. In this vein, the sociologist Portocarrero said “what the Peruvian population admires as ideal and desirable is white and blond” (2013, p. 166).   What has been called “aspirational advertising” shows this. Curiously, “aspirational advertising” may eventually present, as a Benetton advertisement, people of different races, but not people with indigenous phenotypes traits (e.g. aquiline nose, slanted eyes), except brown or black color—even when indigenous phenotypes traits are widely disseminated in the Peruvian population.

The interrelation of culture, economic and phenotypical traits (including color) is illustrated by common expressions used in Peru like: “money whitens”, “white meat even if it is man's”, “door color people”, “browning”, “cooper race”. This will also be illustrated from the social discussion raised by the ethnic identification categories in the recent national census of 2017. Hence, following Zavala and Back (2017, p. 32), we can understand that race (and color as a part of it) is not about what a person “is” but with the way it is located in a time and space based on power relations. So, it is important to note that moral and civic education must address these issues, although currently there is very little that is done about it.

 

References

Dixon, A.& Telles, E. (2017). Skin color and colorism: global research, concepts and measurement. Annual Review of Sociology, 43: 405-424.

Portocarrero, G. (2013). La utopía del blanqueamiento y la lucha por el mestizaje. In Grimson, A. & Bidaseca, K. (coords.). Hegemonía cultural y políticas de la diferencia (pp. 165-2000). Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

Zavala, V. & Back, M. (2017). Introducción. In  Zavala, V. & Back, M (eds). Racismo y lenguaje (pp.11-38). Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial.

 

Colorism in China

/

By Tianlong Yu

Preference for lighter over darker skin color, or colorism, is certainly alive and well in China. I remember while growing up my mother often praised how the several Korean-Chinese girls in my neighborhood school were “pretty” because they had lighter skin color than us. There is a well-known saying we are all familiar with: "A white face covers a hundred ugly things." It is said that young people today seek potential spouses based on some popular criteria, among which are, “tall, rich, and handsome” for men and “white, rich, and beautiful” for women. Naked materialist pursuit of wealth aside, light skin has seemingly become an aesthetic standard. White is the sought-after ideal color. Such beauty standards valuing white skin, of course, harbor a well-established phobia of dark skin colors such as black, viewed by some as “dirty.” 

A Chinese TV commercial on detergent caused an uproar in 2016. In the ad, a black man and a young Chinese woman are flirting; as he leans in for a kiss she thrusts a detergent capsule in his mouth and bundles him into a washer. She sits atop the machine as the man spins and screams inside until, to her apparent delight, out pops a handsome Chinese man dressed in a clean, white t-shirt. This offensive advertising caused outrage on both the Chinese and wider web, with many users blasting it for being racist. “My God,” wrote one user on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, “don't Chinese marketing people get any education about race?” “If you don't understand why it's racist, congratulations, you're a racist," wrote another, after some commentators tried to defend the ad. So, in China, colorism is unequivocally tied to racism against a particular group of people. A large number of Africans now live in China, particularly in southern Guangdong province. Many have complained of facing discrimination and prejudice from locals.

Despite the increasing demographic diversity, China remains largely a racially homogenous nation; and racism does not seem to be institutionalized as it is in, say, the United States. Yet, widespread colorism in China and its occasional escalation to racism cannot be seen as separate from other socio-cultural constructs. I recall the few Korean girls in my community belonged to some well-off families on the military base nearby, so I guess my mother’s praise of their lighter skin color probably hid her unspoken envy for their higher socioeconomic status. The black people living and working in south China today mostly came from African countries, which Chinese have traditionally viewed as poor, backward, and “third-world.” So, the discriminatory colorism is entangled with, and may be bred or fueled by, classism. Nothing says this better than the aforementioned popular spouse-judging standard that centers on money.   

And it is more than classism. The Chinese look down on poor African peoples as “third-world” even though China has long been categorized as a “third world” country itself, and many of the African-bashing Chinese may not be so better off themselves economically. This might have something to do with a historical sense of national pride many Chinese are born with. China has presided over a non-stop 5000-year-long civilization, and the country has been isolated from the outside world for most of its history. Proud of their own achievement but also out of real ignorance of others, Chinese often deemed their country as the Central Kingdom and called everyone else “savage.” When Western powers broke open the Manchurian Court during its final rule in late 19th century with opium and guns and forced unfair treaties upon the weak and corrupt government; the defeated Emperor and his subjects, it is said, still demanded their foreign conquers to knee down before them in meetings, apparently to save nothing but face. It was Sino-centrism in painful but spectacular display.

The accumulative effect of culture, as such, no doubt plays an active role today as Chinese people find themselves in an increasingly diverse world even within their national boundaries. Racially homogenous perhaps, but China has always been a multicultural society with multiple groups of varying ethnicities, religions, and languages, etc., co-existing along with the Han-majority group, and not always peacefully at times. Ethnic and class conflicts have swept many regions in recent years as discrimination reflective of differences in gender, sexuality, religion, language, and disability are all on the rise. And yet, social differences and conflicts are often silenced in a political culture of stability and conformity. As the colorist-racist incidents have shown, many Chinese are woefully ill prepared for such multicultural reality. A national reckoning is needed; and educators must take some major responsibility to educate for real inclusion, equity, and social justice.                  

An Introduction to Colorism

/

By Lawrence Blum

“Colorism” is a term now used to refer to preference for lighter over darker complected people. In the US, the term was first used, or at least brought to prominence, by the African American feminist novelist and thinker Alice Walker (The Color Purple) in the 1980’s. Walker used it to refer to skin-color preference among African Americans, that is, ways that African Americans discriminate against, stigmatize, or prefer lighter to darker skinned blacks.

Thus for Walker, colorism was both a byproduct of but also a distinct phenomenon from racism. To oversimplify a bit, if racism treats all members of the black group in a negative way, colorism makes distinctions within the black group, treating some of them more favorably than others.

The idea of colorism has broadened out beyond stigmatized racial groups, to refer to stigmas on the part of any group toward any other based on skin color. In this form, colorism can be found in many different nations, regions, and cultures around the world, for example, Japan, India, and Brazil (and Latin America more generally). Often the preference is expressed in popular entertainment, where lighter-skinned performers (actors, singers, people in commercials) are preferred to darker skinned ones.

If we ask “what is the source of colorism” we might get different answers in different places. For example, in the US perhaps the source of colorism with respect to African Americans is racism against black people in general. Perhaps darker-skinned blacks are seen as more exemplifying of “racial blackness” than are lighter-skinned blacks, so that preference for the latter over the former could be seen as derivative of racism against the black group itself.

But colorism does not seem to always work this way. In Latin America skin color and race are not always two different things, at least not in the way they are in the US. In many Latin American nations, there is not a distinct ancestry-based idea of race that there is in the US. If someone looks very “white European,” that look defines them. It is not like in the US where there can be a black person who is very white-looking. Perhaps a famous example of this is Walter White, the head of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) for many years and a leading black civil rights leader, who was nevertheless blond and blue-eyed. In Latin America there is not a distinct racial identity and racial order that is distinct from interacts with colorism. There is just colorism.

Yet in both Latin America and the US it is plausible to think that the basis of colorism lies in white supremacy and Eurocentrism, the idea that people of European extraction are superior to non-Europeans. But it is not clear how much Eurocentrism forms the basis of colorism in Asia, for example.

Another question about colorism is whether it is solely an aesthetic phenomenon—that is, a judgment about who is more beautiful. The focus on TV and film actors, in many countries including the US, generally operates on this assumption. The focus on aesthetics in relation to popular entertainment brings out the gendered dimension of colorism, since it is generally thought that darker-skinned women actors suffer from colorism more than darker skinned male actors. In the US an important pushback against colorism was the actress Lupita Nyong’o’s winning an Academy Award for her performance in the acclaimed film, 12 Years a Slave. Nyong’o is very dark-skinned but was regarded as very beautiful and showed up on the cover of many magazines.[1]

But is colorism always only about assessments of beauty? Could there be skin color preference that concerns something other than beauty? For example, there is some evidence that in the US, darker skin is associated with criminality more than lighter skin.

Colorism, like racism, can be conscious or unconscious. People can have preferences based on skin color without knowing that they do, until perhaps someone points it out to them, or they read about the phenomenon which they had not known about before.

In our Symposium on Colorism, contributors from the Race/Multiculturalism SIG from different countries will address some of these complex issue around colorism—how it relates to racism, the gender dimension, the aesthetic dimension, regional and national differences, different bases of colorism, and others.

[1] Nyongo’s part in the film had absolutely nothing to do with her specific skin tone, nor was it drawing on her beauty in any way.