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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 21, 2007 - 02:05 am: | 
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A CounterPunch Special Report
Pigmentation and Empire
The Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry
By AMINA MIRE
Skin-whitening or skin-bleaching is a practice whereby women (and some men) use various forms of skin-whitening products in order to make their skin appear as white as possible. As an anti-aging therapy, skin-whitening promises to "restore" as well as to"transform" the aging skins of women and make them smooth, wrinkle-free-younger-looking. In this context, the natural aging process is systematically framed as a pathological condition which must be interrupted through measures such as "elective surgery" and or by bleaching out the signs of aging such as "age spots." In this way, in the case of white women, skin-whitening is presented as a legitimate intervention designed to 'cure' and mitigate the disease of aging. Skin-whitening as a biomedical intervention is predicated on the pathologization of the natural aging processes in all women, white women in particular.
At least in the United States, racially white eastern and southern European women have used skin-whitening in order to appear as 'white' as their 'Anglo-Saxon' "native" white sisters. In the United States, women of colour also have practiced skin-whitening. Many of the early skin-bleaching commodities such as Nodinalina skin bleaching cream, a product which has been in the US market since 1889, contained 10 per cent ammoniated mercury. Mercury is a highly toxic agent with serious health implications. According to Kathy Peiss , in 1930, a single survey found advertising for 232 different brand names of skin-bleaching creams promoted in mainstream magazines to mainly white women consumers in the United States.
If dark skinned eastern and southern Europeans can "pass" for white with a little help from skin-bleaching creams, those with sufficiently light skin tones but who are legally categorized as racially black by their invisible " one drop" of "black blood", could also "pass" for white as well. The "appearance of whiteness" is the key to accessing the exclusive cultural and economic privileges whiteness accrues. The fear of the infiltration of "invisible' blackness has fuelled both the marketing strategies of industry and the anxieties of white women that they may not appear "white enough". Peiss writes:
"Dorothy Dignam's ads for Nadinola skin bleach and Nadine face power, appearing in mass circulation women's magazine, resurrected the Old South. "This line made in the South was largely sold to the Negro market; the advertising was a planned attempt to capture the white market also. Her paean to "the beauty secret of Southern women," featuring plantations, magnolia blossoms, and hoop-skirted bells, erased any hint of Nadinola's black clientele. Although usually rendered obliquely, racial prejudice was an explicit talking point for manufacturers Albert F. Wood: "A white person objects to a swarthy brown-hued or mulatto-like skin, therefore if staying much out of doors use regularly Satin Skin Vanishing Greaseless Cream to keep the skin normally white (Peiss 1998,150)."
But even though the anxiety of bearing the invisible mark of black blood has, in part, fuelled white women's skin-whitening practices, Peiss rejects the actual possibility that some women of colour may have passed for white by using skin-whitening creams. This is because, according to Peiss, African American women had "disabling" African features that would not allow them to pass for white. In this way, while skin-whitening helped 'dark skinned' eastern and southern European immigrant women to blend into the "secure" domain of whiteness, the racial border between whiteness and blackness is magically secured by the social and political order of the colour line.
Women might purchase a skin whitener that covered and colored the skin and simultaneously disclaim its status as paint. For women of European descent, whitening could be absorbed within acceptable skincare routine and assimilated into the ruling beauty ideas, the natural face of white genteel womanhood-although, as Jessie Benton Frémont testified, one glance at the hands could undo this careful effort to naturalize artifice. For African Americans, the fiction was impossible: Whitening cosmetics, touted as cures for "disabling" African features, reinforced a racialized aesthetic through a makeover that appeared anything but natural.
What these more than "skin deep," uniquely "disabling" African features were is not stated by Peiss. However, this crude insinuation hints at Peiss' refusal to entertain the possibility that skin-whitening may have been used not just by eastern and southern dark skinned women to "pass for Anglo-Saxons," but that women of colour who were sufficiently light skinned have also practiced skin-whitening in order to "pass" for white. Since appearing white is the "only game in town," there are no other grounds outside of appearance on which whiteness as an exclusive racial identity can be secured. Piess's historical documentation of the history of the formation and consolidation of the American beauty industry clearly demonstrates that skin-whitening has facilitated the "racial passing" of certain dark skinned women from eastern and southern Europe. In this context, the practice of skin-whitening is implicated in the American history of racial segregation and racial "passing."
Peiss's analysis precludes the possibility of African Americans with light skins passing for white by using skin-whitening creams, while claiming that eastern and southern European women with "dark skin tones" could do so, implicitly offers skin-whitening as 'legitimate' when practicd by 'white' women and as 'illegitimate' and futile for women of colour. This is also the paradigm of much of the published medical literature on the health risks associated with the use of skin-whitening creams with toxic chemical agents. Even though white women have been using both lead and mercury based skin-whitening creams in order to whiten their faces and bodies for centuries, when it comes to warning the public about the dangers associated with this deadly practice, it is often the terribly damaged faces of women of colour which are used for visual illustration.
For example, almost all the medical literature published by western medical and dermatology journals offer us women of colour as victims of the dubious desire for unattainable corporeal whiteness. This same unattainable desire is often reinforced with horrifying images of the damaged faces and bodies of women of color after using cheap skin-whitening creams containing toxic chemical agents such as ammoniated mercury, corticosteroids, and hydroquinone.
The faces of Black South Africans permanently damaged by long-term use of Over-the-Counter (OTC) 2 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening cream.
The emphasis on such 'health risks'has facilitated the production, and marketing around the world, of new and, conceivably, 'safer' but highly expensive skin-whitening commodities and combatant technologies. The emerging 'high-end' skin-whitening commodities are marketed mainly to affluent Asian women to modify skin tone, also to white women as anti-aging therapy.
So, as one might might expect, race, class and gender dynamics inform the marketing strategy of the new skin-whitening corporate drive. The symbolic and literal 'whitening' of darker bodies still conditions the advertising rhetoric for skin-whitening products.
In Africa, the practice of skin-whitening is traditionally associated with white colonial oppression . Those who practiced skin-whitening, were and are still condemned as self-hating dupes, suffering from an inferiority complex. Consequently, those engaging in this practice often do so covertly. So it is only when users of skin-whitening seek medical help from the devastating effects of bodily damage caused by the use of toxic skin-whitening creams that news about this practice gets to the public domain. Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions (1988) succinctly captures the contradiction between the colonizing effects of white supremacy and African women's yearning for respectability and idealized feminine aesthetics of beauty.
"Lucia was my mother's sister, several years younger than my mother and a wild woman in spite of or may be because of her beauty. She was dark like my mother, but unlike my mother her complexion always had a light shinning from underneath the skin, so she could afford to scoff at the skin-lightening creams that other girls used."
The association in the above quote of girls with "bad skin" with the use of skin-lightening cream is interesting. On the one hand, it suggests that skin-whitening has a therapeutic function. On the other hand, it may be referring to one of the sinister side effects of the use of skin-whitening: the systemic darkening of the affected area of the skin due to the accumulation of toxic skin-whitening residue inside the skin called exogenous ochrinosis (cf.2). Currently, many African countries have banned the commercial trafficking of skin-whitening. However, skin-whitening products, including those containing highly toxic chemical agents, are currently aggressively marketed to white women in North America as "anti-aging therapy." It is not clear how 2 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening cream can cause a permanent disfigurement of African women's faces and bodies while 4 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening cream can be promoted to white women as anti-aging therapy. The following ad is for a skin-whitening cream called Lustra which contains 4 per cent hydroquinone.
This is the same chemical agent which has caused the disfigurement of the South African woman in the above image and of countless other women around the world. This product is manufactured by a major US- based pharmaceutical company. Lustra skin-whitening cream is extensively promoted on internet shops, beauty salons and dermatology offices in the United States. The primary clientele of Lustra are white middle-class women. |
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