Home » Afro-Caribbean
Category Archives: Afro-Caribbean
“My Favourite Things”: Stephanie Richards

My favourite TV show - Narcos - I have always been fascinated with the story of Pablo Escobar. Narcos gives a very good insight into the corruption behind the Columbian Cartel and as a viewer you are immersed into the shocking world of drug trafficking My favourite place to go - The theatre, I have been to see various productions. My all time favourite show would have to be The Lion King My favourite city - I love the hustle and bustle of London. There are so many things to do. So many sights to see and it is brimming full of culture My favourite thing to do in my free time - Shopping My favourite athlete/sports personality - Usain Bolt, he runs with so much finesse My favourite actor - Christoph Waltz, I like how versatile he is. From his comical performance in Horrible Bosses 2 to his terrifying role in Inglourious Basterds, he is always on point in his roles My favourite author - Charles Dickens My favourite drink - A classic Mojito My favourite food - This is a hard decision to make as I am a real foodie. I would have to choose a classic Carrot Cake with cream cheese frosting My favourite place to eat - Ascough’s Bistro – Market Harborough I like people who - encourage others to do well and celebrate their success I don’t like it when people - are jealous and sabotage others My favourite book - Nicholas Nickleby, it reminds me of my teenage years My favourite book character - there are too many to choose! My favourite film - I am a big fan of 80’s and 90’s films, my favourite has to be Romancing the Stone. I love adventure films, I also love The Goonies My favourite poem - Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, I say no more My favourite artist/band - – I am a big music lover. I like music from all genres from Motown and RnB to Hip hop and Drum and Bass. Whitney Houston will always be my number 1 female artist My favourite song - I don’t have one, but Chris Brown's Indigo Album has been on repeat since 2019. This album is a masterpiece My favourite art - Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. This reminds me of the winter nights during my favourite time of year, Christmas My favourite person from history - Queen Nanny – she was a lady captured from the Asante people and brought to Jamaica and sold into slavery. She is an important figure in the Jamaican rebellion against slavery. She escaped the plantation she was held on and settled in the Blue Mountain region of Jamaica. There she set up Nanny town which was a free village for Maroons/ African slaves and Arawak that had escaped their slave masters. This settlement was a key element for the uprising against oppression. Queen Nanny was not only a liberator of over 1000 slaves, she was also a warrior and is Jamaica’s only female national hero.

The Euthanasia of the Youth in Asia: Milky White Skin #BlackenAsiawithLove

Shahrukh Khan (SRK) is arguably the Indian film industry’s biggest global star and commercial brand ambassador. In one early advertisement, he strikes a match from a dark-skinned kid’s face to show just how abhorrent it is as a trait. In another ad, ostensibly more humorous, SRK disses a group of traditional Northern Indian wrestlers for wearing skirts and make-up. The star chides them for using the feminine product instead of (converting to) the newly available male version (i.e. re-packaged in gray rather than pink). The product? The skin bleach Fair and Handsome. In both ads, the transformed, ‘fairer’ skinned consumer is pummeled with young girls virtually appearing from nowhere.
This follows the typical consumerist trope: The product makes users more popular and sexually appealing. Yet, things got worse. Clean and Dry’s ‘intimate’ bleaching shower gel for women (C&D). Yes, you read right: A bleaching shower gel aimed at lightening brown women’s crotches. There’s no male equivalent, save for a well-circulated spoof called Gore Gote: India’s #1 Testicular Fairness Cream (Mukherjee). In the initial shot of the C&D advertisement, a pouty-mouthed (fair-skinned) woman is ignored by her (fair-skinned) husband in their (upper-middle-class) apartment. Naturally, it seems, she bleaches her labia with C&D. After displaying the product’s virtues, the husband literally chases the wife around the fancy flat as she playfully dangles (his) keys. Her secret to happiness: A newly bleached intimate area. Is this a proxy for a white woman’s vagina?
What’s wrong with consumerism? The marketplace will not save you. As a Black person interested in self-love, it is clear that the market is murderous. There, the fetish of blackness is made widely available, as if one could bottle stereotypical ‘coolness’ and sell it to the youth in Asia, one of the largest consumer groups in the world. Fashion shops targeting youth regularly plaster posters of Bob Marley or Hip-Hop thugs to peddle goods to youth. Yet, standing in the rotunda of this mall, one could see shops of every major western cosmetics brand, including Clinique, Mac, Estée Lauder. Here in Asia, the flagship product in each shop is skin bleach! Black is cool, but white is power. Ironically, at the time I was modeling for a campaign in Vogue and Elle Décor in India, yet none of the make-up artists carried my mocha shade (shady, right).
YELLOW FEVER
The skin bleach industry is by far the most virulent of all consumer products – even fast food. The bulk of this industry is meted out on the bodies of women…and girls who learn early that fate of darkness (just check out any Indian Matrimonials page). According to an August 2019 article in Vogue: “Per a recent World Health Organization report (WHO), half of the population in Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines uses some kind of skin lightening treatment. And it’s even higher in India (60%) and African countries, such as Nigeria (77%).” After a 7 minutes instrumental intro to his 1976 hit, Yellow Fever, Fela Kuti chants: “Who steal your bleaching?/Your precious bleaching?…/Your face go yellow/Your yansh go show/Your mustache go show/Your skin go scatter/You go die o.”
It’s lethal, often a mercurous poison used to kill the soul. It is a fetishization of whiteness, that reveals the “internalization of the coloniser’s inferiorisation of dark skin as native and Other” (Thapan: 73). It’s euthanasia. Skin bleachers are painlessly killing themselves, willingly participating in their own annihilation. Not only does it quite literally murder the melanin in one’s skin, it symbolically kills one’s ‘dark and native’ self, giving birth to a new and improved modern identity. It requires constant application and reflects a consumerist’s self-regulation. Bleach is expensive, despite the industry’s ‘bottom of the pyramid’ approach to the marketing 4P’s – bleach sold in cheap tiny packages for the poor. Skin bleach is a form of mimesis, to actually embody modernity through crafting the ‘cultivated, developed and perfected’ self (Thapan: 70).
When I began teaching at UoN, I was asked to propose topics for business ethics modules, which were then optional. Hesitantly, I suggested skin bleach and hair weaves. Looking at the composition of the student body, this would be as familiar to them, as the products were locally available (see picture below taken in an ‘ethnic’ hair shop on Northampton’s high street). Several students have subsequently pursed these subjects in their dissertations. I was sad to learn that in colloquial Somali, ‘fair skin’ is a moniker for pretty, just as we western Blacks use ‘light skin and long hair’. Colourism makes dark-skinned people unsafe in our own homes.
I was pleasantly surprised at the support from the module leader, an older, straight white man. He said he knew little about the politics of black and brown skin and hair, yet listened with great interest and did his own research into the matter. What’s more, he stood by me both literally and figuratively. He was there when I was called to account for some negative student feedback such as “I’m a guy, I don’t wear make-up,” when asked to consider the differential impact of beauty standards on the psyches and earnings of women in business. He stood by me when I’d dropped the F-word (feminism) into the curriculum. This was before the Gender Pay Gap became more widely known or theBritish government required audits from large organisations. He is an ally. He stood by me in ways that may have been riskier for individuals outside the circles of normative power of gender, race and class. Talk about a way to use one’s privilege!
References
Kuti, F. (1976). Yellow Fever. [LP] Decca 8 Track Studios. Available at: https://genius.com/Fela-kuti-and-africa-70-yellow-fever-annotated [Accessed 13 Nov. 2019].
Mukherjee, R., Banet-Weiser, S. and Gray, H. (2019). Racism Postrace. Durham, N.C.
Thapan, M. (2009). Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India. New Delhi: SAGE.