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!
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.
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?
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/1101020805/story2.html
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
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)
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.
For people who actually lived in India for an extended period of time:
1. what is the driving force behind this market? is it purely aesthetics, like tanning creams, or does race play into it?
2. how large is the phenomenon? is it something common that many people think about or just a fringe market?
3. how is it viewed by the locals? are people who do this kind of thing ashamed to admit it?
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?
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?
Everyone has their morality line drawn somewhere.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It has been argued that the fascination with fair skin came about because of the Indo-Aryan migration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migration) though some people have argued that Aryans were indigenous to India as far back as the Harappan civilization. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Aryans)
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.
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.
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.
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.
wow. did not know that.
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.
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
And no, I am not a brahmin.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2231011.stm
"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."
the word 'caste' comes from the Sanskrit 'Varna' which means 'skin color'.
see http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl...
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.
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.
Also, I wonder what it is that makes black-white marriages taboo, while asian-white marriages are almost becoming the norm in some places.
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.
"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)
With what I know about the Indian education system, 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).
(I look Hispanic myself, and realized how much they are disliked when my wife observed that I receive glares and cold stares from strangers).
When you have a society where bribing is the norm (nothing is possible without a bribe basically, and even then its not guaranteed), the people with wealth are obviously going to be the ones to benefit most and stay on top. No matter how intelligent, if you don't have the money for the bribes, you can't get anywhere.
Yes K to 12 level education needs money but University admissions do not depend at all on what school you attended, only on your score in the Std 12 exam held by the state or an entrance exam. Further there are 25 - 50% reservations for poor people from lower castes in most Universities. So yes bribing is a big problem and so is casteism but one place where the problem is close to non existent is higher education.
It is like saying, if you studied in public school in small town america, you cannot get into Harvard.
Your small town analogy doesn't work. A better analogy is if you went to a poor inner city public school, then you can't get into Harvard. This is basically true, since you don't receive a good enough education to get the scores to get in. Also, if your family is poor, especially in India, you have to work to support your family and self rather than focus on your school work, which leads to lower grades and test scores.
Further, there is actually reservation for poor people from lower castes (25 - 50% of the seats). So it's not the same thing. I don't disagree with ingenium that better socio-economic opportunities help richer people do better, but the discrimination against lower caste people is not systemic in higher education.
It's just a fact that people with more wealth have better socioeconomic opportunity than people with less wealth, not that they're more intelligent. This means better schools and better education.