Over the Top Racism

posted by Sam Richards

In my twenty years of teaching about race I think I can count on my ten fingers the things that I’ve heard or read that I thought were utterly and unquestionably “racist.” That’s a word that gets kicked around far too liberally and to which people apply far too many non-sensical definitions. Anything they don’t like, for example, is often called “racist” if it involves human physical or cultural differences in any way.

So here’s the technical definition of the word: believing that some person or group is superior or inferior than another person or group because of some identifiable physical characteristics that they cannot change (because they’re fixed, bodily features). That’s it. Simple. So people with curly or kinked hair are superior or better or preferable because they have curly or kinked hair. Generally there is some justification association with the identified characteristic (e.g., kinked hair causes increased blood flow to the brain and increased blood flow leads to greater intelligence). I’ve never heard anyone make that argument, by the way, although I’m sure that it has been articulated.

There is nothing in this academic definition that presupposes that less powerful groups–and in the West that would be black and brown people–cannot be racist because they lack the ability to limit the collective abilities of more powerful groups. It’s just a straight-up definition that can apply to anyone, even the most marginalized and disenfranchised people in any society.

So along comes the issue of skin whitening. White skin is better than brown skin is the belief spread round the planet. Why? Because it’s more beautiful. There’s rarely some sort of practical argument linked to this particular preference, aside from making the case that lighter skin will lead to greater opportunities in a society of people who hold dark-skinned people with distrust or even in contempt. That’s pretty practical given the many hundreds of studies that conclude that the darker the skin the more numerous the hurdles people face in every facet of social and political life.

Watch this CNN video about the proliferation of skin whitening creams. It’s so blatently “racist” (i.e., grounded in the belief that people with lighter skin are better than those with darker skin) that the defenders of the practice look foolish in their justifications.

So what to do? We can’t legislate this kind of activity. If people want to go so far as to bleach their skin, then who am I to stop them. Of course, what if they’re going to unknowingly do serious bodily damage to themselves? And what about the fact that people who play into this image that “white is better” make it more difficult for the people who are happy to live with the skin that was endowed to them by their creator–but who nonetheless suffer the consequences of racism that are strengthened by the perpetuation of this practice?

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