Africa: Where black is not considered beautiful (BBC)

[Insensitive]

nikkas can't say shyt about Africans with out people tryna find some politically correct squeak hole to get out of it.

This is a board of 18-24 year old black people, for the most part. Africa having 54 different countries isn't some unknown thing.

fukk does 54 different countries have to do with the fact that all of them suffer from the after effects of imperialism/neo-colonialism? It happens around the world in every colonized country. The countries in Africa are no different.

so the damaging effects of
Imperialism/neo-colonialism = All Africans are ****'s ?
You don't see anything wrong with that ?

 

[Wild self]

SMH @ dark skinned women bleaching their skin for approval. SMH @ the c00ns that simp on light skinned women all the time and wanting to have "pretty babies."

 

[Primetime]

As a Nigerian, reading/hearing shyt like this is both disgusting and infuriating.

I dug around and there is a great article that goes in-depth into all of this for those who are interested. Its a long read and i couldn't even quote the entirety of it, but here's the link and the first half of it quoted with bolded points. I recommend you click on the link and read the whole thing though as they got added videos and visuals from past studies, speeches and interviews.

Who taught you to hate the colour of your [dark] skin? - Opinion - This Is Africa

by Siji Jabbar

Will we manage to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery (in the words of Bob Marley) or will the problem eventually just go away as the world turns beige from increased interracial marriage? It's going to take a long time for the latter to happen, so we've got no choice but to do the former because most Africans are dark-skinned, and we have to see the beauty in that for our own psychological well-being.

Our thinking seems to be: the darker we are the more "African" we are, which wouldn't be a problem if some of us didn't think there was something wrong with being African. Why do we think that? Malcolm X once asked, “Who taught you to hate yourself? Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the colour of your skin?"

We were taught to hate ourselves through centuries of the slave trade (Arab and trans-Atlantic) and the colonial period that followed, and we are still being taught to hate ourselves through a western consumer culture that is sold through today's global media. And many of those who don't go in for skin-lightening also tacitly accept the idea that lighter is better (particularly if it comes with European, rather than African, features), so we're all part of a system that promotes self-hate. When people defend skin-lightening/bleaching by saying what people do to their skin is their own business, it's usually a sign that they too value lighter skin over dark skin, whatever their own skin tone.

Does self-hatred sound too strong a term? What else is one to conclude when you have someone like South African kwaito star Mshoza proudly stating that she started undergoing skin-lightening and plastic surgery because she was "tired of being ugly"?

This internalised form of racism is an invisible presence in our psyches, and some of us don't even realise it's a factor in how we perceive ourselves and others. Thus, for instance, black guys (not only in Africa) think their attraction to light-skinned girls is just a matter of taste, and some who lighten their skin can't articulate why they do so beyond saying that it's just prettier, as though skin lightening were akin to putting on lipstick. It's a matter of identity, self-worth and self-acceptance, that, in some respects, is even existential.

There is some evidence of colorism (system of privilege, discrimination and hierarchies based on social meanings attached to skin tone) in Africa before contact with Europeans in the 16th century, but by and large, Africans used shared culture, language and traditions, rather than skin tone, as a means of identification. But part of the process of creating an European empire was to define the European self in contrast to everyone else. How could you justify dominating and enslaving other people if you didn't tell yourself you were better in every way? Europeans placed themselves at the pinnacle of the human race and dark-skinned Africans at the very bottom. To be black was to be primitive, backward, inferior, dirty, ugly, evil, devilish, deviant, corrupt and unappealing, while to be white was to be virtuous, beautiful, refined, humane, intelligent and godly.

By the nineteenth century, spurious scientific "evidence" was being produced to support this dichotomy, thereby providing an ideological justification for colonialism. It also provided a means of control: tell the lighter-skinned black Africans that they are more beautiful, intelligent and industrious than their darker-skinned brothers and sisters, and soon you will create divisions that make control easier. A 1930 French ad for Dirtoff showed a dark African man washing his hands, with the soap washing away his blackness. Such ads were common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Blackness had become a pathological condition - there was something fundamentally wrong with you if you were black - while whiteness became the paradigm, the standard, the ideal, and who doesn't want to be ideal?

Meanwhile, in America, skin tone was also used to control and sow divisions among black people, and, as a side bonus, to warp their minds. Bi-racial offspring of white masters and black slaves were made house slaves and separated from their darker-skinned counterparts, who remained in the fields. Thus the feelings of inferiority created by the condition of being enslaved permeated even deeper. Black people in America were repeatedly told that everything about them was evil, ugly and unwanted. There were even debates among white Americans questioning whether or not black people were human beings with souls. This would be irrelevant to what was, and still is, going on in Africa if it weren't for the fact that colorism is very much alive in America (and Europe) today, and is manifested in the images from America (and Europe) that many Africans use to assess and define themselves.

Colonialism didn't end that long ago. If you are reading this, then your parents or grandparents either suffered from or benefited directly from colonialism. As Africans, we freed ourselves and won our independence, but psychologically we continued to view ourselves through the lens of whiteness. In other words, we were left with the shackles of colonial mentality.

According to Wikipedia, colonial mentality occurs "when a foreign colonial or imperial power is too strong to be effectively resisted, the colonised population often has no other immediate option than to accept the rule of the foreigners as an inescapable reality of life. As time progresses, the colonised indigenous people-natives would perceive the differences between the foreigners and themselves, between the foreigners' ways and the native ways. This would then sometimes lead the natives to mimic the foreigners that are in power as they began to associate that power and success with the foreigners' ways. This eventually leads to the foreigners' ways being regarded as the better way and being held in a higher esteem than previous indigenous ways.

So there were parents who, after colonial rule, would compliment their light-skinned kids on their "beautiful, light skin", unaware to the potential psychological damage their comments might be causing. Suddenly the kid is made conscious of something he/she needs to maintain in order to be liked. Meanwhile, any dark-skinned kids overhearing the compliment start to have a complex about their skin tone. And their skin tone, they grow up with particular ideas about standards of beauty. You still hear such compliments today, parents complimenting kids, men complimenting women, and women commenting on other women's skin tone.

"Who taught you to hate the colour of your skin?” Arab slave traders, then Europeans, and now we're continuing the work ourselves (with some assistance from afar).

Thus the idea of lighter being better is reinforced by some parents today, but the most powerful way this message is reinforced is through consumer culture and global mass media. The mass media form for us our image of the world. The images they present and how these images are presented subliminally and yet profoundly affect the way in which we interpret what we see or hear. Even our images of ourselves is greatly influenced by what media shows us about our own group. People who lighten their skin and those who associate light skin with positive virtues and dark skin with negative ones aren't stupid. They just don't have the psychological resources to withstand and deluge of images they are presented with every day. Thousands of images from magazines, TV, film, ads, and the news, all equating light skin with beauty, affluence, happiness and success, and portraying dark-skinned black people as aggressive, unintelligent, criminals, crude, lazy, etc.

Even black-owned media do this. There was a brief period during the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and its accompanying Black is Beautiful campaign when dark-skinned women graced the pages of the popular and influential magazine Ebony, but by the eighties it had gone back to featuring predominantly light-skinned black stars, and this was particularly so for the women it featured. This practice is common across all media, so dark-skinned women are hugely underrepresented on the catwalk, in the fashion press, in cinema and on TV.

There is no conspiracy that says this is how we want to represent the world, but there is a unconscious mindset of racial superiority that determines what gets promoted as beautiful and desirable, and in that mindset there is no room for the idea of dark-skinned beauty. Or hardly any room. Alek Wek (South Sudan/UK), Ajuma Nasenyana (Kenya), Naomi Campbell (UK) and Eunice Olumide (Nigeria) are among the tiny handful of high-profile dark-skinned models on the international stage, but as Eunice says, “… it is still rare to see a very dark-skinned model on the cover of a magazine. I’d love that to change.”

Most of the foreign media and movies consumed in sub-Saharan Africa are from America and Europe, so we take in these images and mimic the practice of colorism in our own ads and magazines. We see which black women are considered beautiful by the mass media, we see that the black models and singers who are making it are mostly lighter-skinned – Rihanna, Beyoncé, etc., we see which actresses get to play love-interest roles and which ones get relegated to bit parts, and we see which ones make it onto those Top 100 lists. We echo the message we receive and perpetuate the system that excludes dark skin from the spectrum of beauty. We see pictures of Obama and we see don't just see a black man, but a mixed-race, light-skinned black man. Some argue that the beauty ideal is shifting from white to a more cafe-au-lait-complexion, and that this is demonstrated by the fact that women like Beyoncé, Halle Berry and Jennifer Lopez now routinely top some of these "most beautiful" lists. But what seems to have happened there is that the previous practice of promoting only white women as beautiful was simply not sustainable when a significant proportion of the American population was clearly non-white, so the parameters were widened to include a handful of non-white women who are not too many skin tones away from being white. Now black people everywhere can feel they're included in the international beauty spectrum without really being included. Might it have been better for black people if the old unspoken pollcy of "whites only" had been allowed to continue? If the mass media really wanted to include black people, there would be no need to lighten the skin of the already light-skinned black women, as L'Oreal did with Beyoncé in its 2008 campaign, and as many magazines continue to do. Google "most beautiful women in the world" and try to spot any dark-skinned black women on any of the lists you find.

When you look at the Nigerian film industry (to take the largest of its kind in Africa), you find that its lead characters tend to be light-skinned. Fela's condemnation of the practice in Yellow Fever (1976) doesn't seem to have done much good. Check the Ghanaian film industry and you'll find the same.

For dark-skinned black people, being excluded in this manner says black is not beautiful, and the epitome of beauty is a light-skinned person, so this is what you should aspire to if you're dark-skinned. It says it from every billboard, magazine cover, TV ad, packaged product on the shelf, and film thousands of times a day. Every day. So we continue to be socialised into accepting light skin (and straight hair) as defining standards of black beauty. We continue to succumb to - and create - images that reinforce a psychologically-damaging message. And some of us go to great lengths to achieve the beauty ideal of black people as defined by Europeans and people of European descent, people who look nothing like black Africans.

If women in Africa are more susceptible to this than men, it is merely because women are judged much more heavily on the basis of appearance. Men are more likely to be considered valuable when they have wealth, education and other forms of human capital, while women are considered valuable when they are physically attractive, even if they lack other capital. Flick through those magazines and you'll find that the women featured are almost always a few shades lighter than the men. Black men don't need to be light-skinned to be worth paying any attention, but black women do. In one Tanzanian study, women claimed Tanzanian men preferred white, soft-skinned girls. Thus, skin-lightening was of utmost importance in attracting men. And once you've got a guy, you wanna hang on to him: another woman in the study explained that she used skin-lightening products to prevent her husband from being attracted to other girls, while yet another, a 25 year old, reported that she “started bleaching to be beautiful and to look like Arabians or Europeans and attractive to people, especially men.” We are all competing for mates, and we do whatever we can to give ourselves an advantage over the next person.

 

[Mountain]

The Coli......where stats are always bullshyt......unless it makes black people look good or makes white people look bad

Funny.

It's one thing to be pressured to do this in a european or american society but to do it back home is .

Its a shame breh, but you already know why it happens, so why ask? Whites predominate the most powerful, advance nations in the world and yield the most media influence, so of course non-white races are going to emulate them. If we as men really want to change the condition of our people, we must consolidate and build our own, but yall ain't trying to hear that.

 

[BOBN]

whats c00ning is way you fools look up to your colonial masters-colonial masters right arm the BBC like "why???! but I looked up to them!!"

the BBC is fookin shyt. overbloated self-serving part of the establishment sex-offender harbouring c*ntflaps, and they cant put on a good programme to save their lives (unless its about birds and stuff ). they wouldnt last 5 minutes in the real world.

 

[Primetime]

In Brazil, individuals with lighter skin and who are racially mixed generally have higher rates of social mobility, and dark skinned people are more likely to be discriminated against. Most South American actors and actresses have mostly European features - light or light-mixed eyes, protruding narrow noses, straight hair and/or pale skin. So there's pressure for dark-skinned Brazilians to lighten their skin, too.

Colonial mentality reigns across Asia, too. Most Indian actors and actresses have light skin, and the Indian obsession with light skin recently reached a new low with a campaign for a product to lighten the skin around your vagina.

When Alek Wek appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, the host confided: "If you had been on the cover [of a magazine] when I was growing up, I would have had a different concept of who I was." If we wait for the global mass media to routinely include dark-skinned black people with African features in their spectrum of beauty, we will wait a long time to develop a healthy concept of who we are.

 

[Luchini]

we don't have those problems in the horn of africa

 

[TELL ME YA CHEESIN FAM?]

so the damaging effects of
Imperialism/neo-colonialism = All Africans are ****'s ?
You don't see anything wrong with that ?

whats even more crazy and pathetic is most of these bleaching fools think when their skin turns light their babies gonna come out light too

 

[Field Marshall Bradley]

Article is BS. The fact that they took a BS study using South Africa and applied it to the other 50 countries like it was fact was completely irresponsible

 

[newworldafro]

cant be mad at shorty above though..at least she is a honest

So what kind of example she giving her daughter and son for that matter..........and is she going to starting bleaching them or allow them to start bleachign themselves...??? ..... breh

 

[ShabbaDanks]

77% Nah wahhh ooooo
I lived in Benin City for a 6 months with my pops, and saw maybe like 15 people tops that were bleaching and i was out very frequently

 

[Akata Man Bromo]

Damn I came in here for laughs and left disgusted and a little sad

 

[TELL ME YA CHEESIN FAM?]

So what kind of example she giving her daughter and son for that matter..........and is she going to starting bleaching them or allow them to start bleachign themselves...??? ..... breh

i never said i agree with her c00nish ways..

but she is open and honest bout it..

she said she did it for self esteem issues..
hoes kill themselves everyday due to self esteem issues..if skin bleach can save lives ..i say let em hoes bleach

 

[flusterose]

That's why I laugh at cats on here who like to put women from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, etc. on a pedestal. You can really tell who gets around people from other cultures on here from the shyt they type.

I have a couple of female African friends that I have yet to see without their weave. In fact, they always complain about their cousins back in Africa trying to get them to bring them weave, straightening irons, etc.

People think that people in those countries don't do that stuff because they aren't white washed, when it's really because they don't have the finances/resources available to them. They are more impacted by white influence than America women by far.

You do realize that all your female African friends are like a tiny percentage right?

Bullsht, 77% of our women do not bleach their skin. Damn near my entire family is Nigerian and I visit home pretty frequently. I've only seen a couple of sisters bleach their sht, not the majority, definitely not 8 out of 10 sisters on average like BBC are trying to suggest.

Yup. A damn lie.

Article is BS. The fact that they took a BS study using South Africa and applied it to the other 50 countries like it was fact was completely irresponsible

And ppl are eating this shyt. Skin bleaching is more common in Asia. Most of their skin care products and MU have brightening/lightening in it.

 

[bouncy]

That picture is trickery!.

In the darkskinned version, she is shooting a picture in low light which makes it harder to see her. Plus her skin looks dry, and that is not something we as humans see as beauty. Plus the wig doesn't look right on her, compared to her natural look.

In the lightskinned picture she is surrounded by white, which reflects light, allowing you to see more of her, and it's hard to see if her skin is dry or not.

What needs to be done is people need to learn how to take care of their bodies, and stop using pictures to tell you who is healthy(pretty) or not, because if you aren't aware of the tricks that are being used, you will fall for the hype they want you to believe, and think something is wrong with you as a race instead of how you live, and your health overall.