Yeah, like deodorant, diamonds, Armani, the Model T, cruise ships, tanning salons, makeup, corsets, diet pills, jumbo mortgages, health spas, and The Great Vowel Shift of the 1600s.
Nearly everything is marketed by making you seem like a person of higher social status. If people were comfortable with who they were, we wouldn't need 90% of the goods on the market (and the remaining 10% would likely be much cheaper). It's not human nature to be content with your lot in life; if we made everyone equal, they'd find some new dimension to elevate. Bring on the Star-Bellied Sneetches!
Not so sure about deodorant. Maybe it was once, but damn, I hope people don't use that as an excuse not to use it (and claim that their smell is natural or that they can't smell it).
There is nothing more wrong about this product than tanning creams. The users of this product aren't aspiring to be white people (which seems to be implied). It's used for aesthetic reasons.
I think there is a basic difference between a skin lightener and a tanning product. A more apt analogy would be 'hair relaxers' that were popular in the 1960's and 70's, these products helped African Americans straighten their hair. There is a pretty rich dialog about these products that I think would be worth reading to get a better appreciation of the context and controversy here.
I personally would not want to market a product that advanced an image of beauty in a culture with documented history of racism and classicism against people with dark skin. But that's just me.
It seems to me that as long as ethnicity correlates with appearance, and beauty means a certain kind of appearance, then some ethnicities will be more 'beautiful'. Italian muralists painted pale fat women even though such women were probably more common in Germany -- it was a standard of beauty that happened to favor one ethnic group over the group that promulgated it. Similarly, I don't think the people who decided that tan=attractive were part of some vast Latino/Latina Attractiveness Conspiracy.
It correlates with socioeconomic status. During the middle ages, fat women were considered attractive because it indicated that you had ample food available, a sign of wealth. Now thin women are desirable because it shows you have time to exercise, money for a gym membership, and don't eat at McDonalds.
Same goes for many other physical attributes. In much of Africa and Asia, whiter skin is attractive because white foreigners have all the wealth and power. In the U.S, tanned skin is attractive because it shows that you spend all day on the beach, which means you're wealthy enough to live near the ocean and leisured enough to spend time in the sun.
Humans seem biologically programmed to favor mates that are wealthy and powerful. However, the specifics of "wealthy and powerful" aren't hardwired in, so we take our cues from physical characteristics that appear correlated with wealth and power. When I was a kid, the girls would make fun of all the geeks. Now that geeks tend to be millionaires, they've reversed their tune.
>In much of Africa and Asia, whiter skin is attractive because white >foreigners have all the wealth and power.
This is not true, at least not the way you think. Attraction to (bias for) fair skin is a very very old tradition in India. If you look at Ramayana - one of the two Hindu religious epics which is at least thousands of years old, Sita, the main female character is described as fair many many times.
That many of the ruler classes (The Chitpavan Brahmins in Maharashtra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitpavan and the Moghul Nawabs) had fair skin may also have contributed.
In china and in japan, I don't think it's related to the wealth of white foreigners but more to the fact that peasant who work all day in the field will be more tanned...
Hence, not being tanned was the same as being fat. It showed that one had wealth and didn't need to work hard to get it.
Another possible explanation (at least in japan) is a question of geography. The center of power in japan has usually been around Tokyo or Kyoto and people there tend to be more lightly skinned as people from the south.
So which culture are you from? You can't be an American? And of course America is a culture without a history and prejudice against people with dark skin right?
To understand it better all you have to do is walk around in a big Japanese city and look at the print ads (or hell just watch some of the commercials)... it still perplexes me to this day
This is not the same. It does not come out of a fascination with westerners and is a much older bias. See my other comments for an more detailed explanation.
I forgot about ancient Egypt where it was looked down upon if a woman was dark (it looked as if she worked the fields during the day). It was alright for men though (since they have to command slaves/troops day or night)
I would not be willing to spend years getting inside the heads of customers whose mindset I oppose. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his soul?
This is not exactly racism. It is a different kind of bias based on the same physical feature but you will see it between members of the same family. So for e.g. if there are two sisters in a family and one has darker skin, she is very often subject to discrimination. So also with brothers though to a lesser degree (so this is not entirely gender based).
In short this is bias, and it is horrible, but it is not racism. Interestingly this bias does automatically RESULT in racism, so you would typically see people of African origins depicted as goons in older Hindi movies. This has changed slowly. I am quite sure the rising popularity of rap and Hollywood has contributed to this change.
I don't mind spending an hour or a day understanding why they think the way they do. What I would mind is spending years at it, coupled with selling them something they think they need when what they really need is a change of mind.
Bayesian treatment of email examines a large number of indicators (words) and chooses the best ones to make decisions. It can be very reliable. Prejudice works with a much smaller number of indicators (race, gender, etc.), most of which are poor quality, resulting in a lot of wrong decisions.
Stereotypes are useful in books and movies, because they fool you into thinking you have deep knowledge of a character you're barely acquainted with. In real life this is not a good thing.
1) It is pure aesthetics, but the bias against darker skin, while not based on race, is deep rooted and does result in people with darker skin being discriminated against. It is not to the degree of dark skinned people not being allowed in X places, but it is bad enough that a groom would very often choose a fairer bride to a darker one.
2) It is very wide spread.
3) Not really. It has been around for thousands of years and has very little to do with recently developed fascination for or admiration for Europeans. Conceivably it could have it's roots in the "Aryan invasion" theory or a another time thousands of years ago when the ruling class had fair skin, but you will see references to "fair princesses" in mythological Hindu texts thousands of years ago. It is important to note though that there are references to "dark skinned beautiful women" also in some of these texts. So the bias could have been regional inside India. I don't know of anyone who has studied this extensively.
One more question, is there a movement in India to counter this trend? kind of like the civil-rights movement in the US 50 years ago?
Also, a related question, how prevalent is the caste system? are people discriminated against based on their caste? I hear it's not a significant factor anymore, but what's your experience been?
Yes. Google Babasaheb Ambedkar. He led such a movement 50 years ago. This movement is now very politicized though and not very true to it's roots I am afraid.
1) I hate to say it but often lower castes have dark skin and african features. You will also find most of the brightest students in a University are brahmins - the highest caste - just ask your friends their caste and correlate with their intelligence. The caste system is racist. You cannot change your caste. Period. You were born with it. It is interesting but sad. Forced hereditary occupations lead to differences in appearance and even IQ across thousands of years. Low castes clean toilets - high castes are priests in temples (translation: the intellectual leaders today).
2) The caste system is very prevalent. It also leads to corruption similarly as Rick Warren found tribalism was the cause of corruption in Africa.
3) How many white-black mixed marriages do you see in America? Not many. Most kids up for adoption are biracial black-white. The prejudices remain over here in the USA - at least in relationships. Read the chapter on preferences in interracial dating in the book Freakonomics.
I think you've been modded down as noting the differences between races is seen to be discriminating against them in the US.
There could be a number of factors that determine the difference between university entrance scores for different racial groups. While those places are free, lower caste groups may be too worried about feeding themselves, or trying to protect themselves in rough environments, to worry about studying. They could also be, in general, less genetically gifted.
Though unpopular, it is no more racist to state the second options than it is to analyse the difference between African and European performance in athletic sports. People once though that a more athletic society was responsible for the generally better performance of Africans. these days most sports physiologists will acknowledge that African people have a genetically higher percentage of 'fast twitch' muscles.
Just because something is unpalatable does not mean it shouldn't be discussed.
No, he is modded down because he is making factually inaccurate statements (which are also racist). Where is the data backing up his claim that the most intelligent students in colleges across India come from the highest caste?
What the hell is "african features"? You say the caste system is racist and then yourself say the most intelligent people are from higher castes. Don't you think that is a racist claim?
By the way I know several people from lower castes who are super intelligent. And forced hereditary occupations are a thing of the past EVERYWHERE. Even in Bihar, our most backward state, you can't FORCE someone from the lower cast to stick to a profession (which is why Lalu Prasad Yadav, our railway minister and his party came to power, by fighting for Dalits, or at least claiming to).
Make no mistake, the caste system is very prevalent but you don't need to exaggerate to make your point.
It is my observation - I too studied in India. It is common knowledge that brahmins (caste) as a group are more intelligent than the average population. For example, They have made up the bulk of Nobel laureates from India.
My room mate was from the untouchable caste (translation for Americans). He was super intelligent too - managed to leave the country and got 2 post graduate degrees in the USA, trained himself to run marathons.
regarding your comment on hereditary occupations, please read this article
"In the dead of the night, when the city of six million goes to sleep, groups of jobless low-caste Hindus, known as Dalits, eke out a living by removing human excrement from pits in the poorer neighbourhoods of the city."
Your comment that forced hereditary occupations lead to differences in IQ. I fail to see the selecting force that would drive a lower IQ. If there are generations of manual labor as an occupation, that would be a selection force in favor of being stronger and bigger, but would not select AGAINST intelligence.
Other than that, there are clear differences in race genetically. Caste, in the Indian sense, is much harder to argue and would have to say the differences are minimal since it is more recent on an evolutionary timescale. Exceptions are when there was forced selection, such as with the slave trade which lead to the descendants of slaves being larger and stronger than those still in Africa. If there is a physical difference in appearance, then there is a high probability of other genetic differences. A perfect example is the distribution of immunity to HIV. It's really only in Europe, specifically Northern and Eastern Europe. Different geographic areas have had different selecting forces over thousands of years, so the populations are different.
Regarding (1) - Have you ever been to South India my friend? So many of the Brahmins from South India I know, the Aiyyars and the Aiyyangars have dark skin. I was born a Brahmin myself and > 75% of my family members have "dark" skin.
The caste system is definitely racist and a much much bigger problem but this whole linking of skin color to castes is just not true.
This is interesting. What stops people from just lying about their caste? or is it something that's actually recorded right on their birth certificate?
Also, I wonder what it is that makes black-white marriages taboo, while asian-white marriages are almost becoming the norm in some places.
Well their last name is what would prevent them from lying. They can change the last name though.
The irony is that there has been reservation for people from lower castes in government jobs and schools across the country and they pay much lower fees and get in with fewer marks. So you now have people from higher castes changing their names to lower castes to cheat and get into schools easily and also pay less.
many Asian/Indian men find white women more attractive - that is why models in these countries tend to look caucasian. It works the other way, too. My wife said that she observed in Africa, that white women only married Africans if they were highly educated, handsome and wealthy.
"what it is that makes black-white marriages taboo"
Black Americans are a lower caste - Unfortunately. How many wealthy intellectual white-black marriages do you see? Few. But now Hispanics are the new ------ in America today. (a certain word that I wont use)
"it is impossible to make it into the best schools without a great deal of personal wealth"
you are mistaken. The best Universities are almost free - subsidized by the government. (However in high schools, those that are English speaking Western schools do require wealth). Only brains counts. The IIT Math entrance exam is said to be the toughest in the world (google for past qs papers).
The thing about wealth is patently untrue. 25 - 50% of the seats in ALL schools (yes, even private colleges, at least in the state I am from) are reserved for poor people from lower castes and their ANNUAL fees are less USD 200. I know first hand that this is true in Maharashtra (the state that Bombay belongs to).
If you can be a pornstar and make some money, would you still execute?
If you can be a doctor that does abortion, would you still execute? (Conversely, if you're a doctor that doesn't do abortions, would you still execute?)
If you can own a tanning salon and make some money, would you still execute?
If you can make songs about selling drugs, pimping ho's, robbing people and make money, would you still execute?
>If you can be a doctor that does abortion, would you still execute? >(Conversely, if you're a doctor that doesn't do abortions, would you still execute?)
I am quite sure all doctors are barred from executing anyone based just on "do no harm" if not the law of the land :P
"catering to prejudice" brings to mind setting up sites for the KKK or something. This is more like girls wanting to look like Britney, or kids dancing like Michael Jackson, or yuppies competing for the best BMW, or strippers getting boob-jobs. It's a social-fashion issue. Yes, perhaps there is prejudice involved, but it sounds more like garden-variety fashion and competition based on looks than deep-seated racism.
The better question to me is where do you draw the line. What's a business model that you wouldn't execute? I draw the line at companies who do not treat people in a way that they themselves would want to be treated and that causes direct bodily harm. For example, if you've got a web site selling drugs to kids over the internet, that's obviously not something you would want sold to your kid.
Nearly everything is marketed by making you seem like a person of higher social status. If people were comfortable with who they were, we wouldn't need 90% of the goods on the market (and the remaining 10% would likely be much cheaper). It's not human nature to be content with your lot in life; if we made everyone equal, they'd find some new dimension to elevate. Bring on the Star-Bellied Sneetches!