A quick question for brown people: Do you still want fair skin?

On a recent Wednesday morning, I was looking at Radisson Blu's entrance door from my seat in the lobby. Between text messages and calls to figure out the whereabouts of an event, I kept staring at the door. 

A white tall man walks in. The doorman and, inside by the x-ray machine to scan bags, a female hotel staff, quickly ran to the door. Opened it, and let in the man. He walked straight through and did not stand in front of the temperature scanner (a Covid-19 protocol) nor, it seems, was he asked to. 

Curious. I thought. Because when I entered through the same door some minutes earlier, I was asked to walk back to the scanner. Having missed noticing it, I whizzed past it at first. And for nearly 45 minutes that I nested myself on the lobby seat, I noticed a subtle difference between how the white men get greeted and how only the brown guests were standing in front of the temperature scanner for a quick second. 

Curiouser, perhaps. But I am not uninitiated to how Bangladesh, a brown country, perceives white skin. And the 5-star hotel lobby view took me back to a May when I was interning for a Boston news outlet. 

The last week of May, two years ago, was unprecedented, especially if you were in the United States. The police killed George Floyd on 25 May in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

The killing led to widespread protests, first in the United States against racially motivated police brutality. Then it spread across the world, in developed countries and others to address systemic discrimination or state-sanctioned violence against dark skin colour. 

This unprecedented series of protests, dubbed as Black Lives Matter movement 2020 (or BLM in short), was the first mass protest in the Covid-19 pandemic era. By May that year, most cities, even whole countries, were under the strictest lockdown protocols and the world, at large, was grappling with the new normal and learning what remote work means.

Remote work generally means more scope and space for reflection. And perhaps since most of us were home-bound that the protests, viral videos and conversations reached as far and wide across the world as they did that year and got everyone involved. 

Nearly everyone was either participating in protests or engaged in talking about skin colour and race. And from my apartment in Quincy, Massachusetts, I wondered about the conversations inside Dhaka's houses. 

It took some weeks, but the ripple effects of BLM 2020 reached South Asia, which came under flak too for its own direct and indirect racist overtones. For its own racist views, which enable brown people to look down at Black skin. Ironic, isn't it? The same people who also suffer from post-colonial sytemic racial discrimination are also the same people who hold inherent racist values and treat people based on their skin colour. I have enough anecdotal examples of this from Dhaka, elsewhere in Bangladesh and interactions with Bangladeshis in the East Coast to take up more than one page in this newspaper.  

While BLM 2020 did not achieve what it set out to those two years ago, it did, finally, at the very least, lead to some changes in policy. But what about us, how do we even measure the toxicity of our centuries-old racist views? A sub-genre of this discrimination is colourism, which essentially means discrimination is based on 'darker' shade of skin complexion. Has anything really changed in this part of the world, and where does this obsession with fairer skin come from anyway?  

A brief flashback: the BLM and the summer of 2020

In America, state by state protests against police brutality started to spread in the last week of May. And by June, the conversation diffused from the streets to offices. After two years, the racially-motivated mass shooting in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York on 14 May this year is telling of America's race problem. White supremacy rages on. 

And Black people are still disproportionately killed by the police. Aljazeera reported, citing Mapping Police Violence, police have killed at least 1,066 people in 2020. More than 28% of those killed were Black, despite African Americans making up only 13% of the approximately 330 million total US population.

However, America, so far, saw some changes such as Breonna's Law passed, Measure J, police department budget cuts, etc.

And if not anything else, the summer of 2020 saw the largest movement in US history, with The New York Times reporting, "Black Lives Matter protests peaked on 6 June [2020], when half a million people turned out in nearly 550 places across the United States," and "polls suggest that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations."

George Floyd, a 46-year-old father, joined a long list of Black Americans who died at the hands of the American police during either an arrest or encounter fueled by racial bias and contaminated with unlawful use of force by the government agency, resulting in the death of one belonging to America's minority groups. Floyd was being arrested on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20.

This killing came following the video footage of the racially motivated murder of Ahmaud Arbery that began circulating in early May. Arbery (aged 25) was chased and shot dead by two white men in Georgia on 23 February. Arbery was out for a jog.

Floyd's killing also came after Breonna Taylor, (aged 26) was killed in her bed at home by police officers serving a "no-knock" warrant for a narcotics investigation on 13 March in Kentucky. Neither Taylor nor her boyfriend (who survived the night) had criminal records. No drugs were found in the apartment. 

The Black Lives Matter movement was born in the summer of 2013 when a police officer was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges for killing a 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February 2012. Martin joined a long list of past victims of America's flawed and deadly racist constitutions. 

And although the Black Lives Matter movement started many years earlier, it was only after George Floyd's murder that it mobilised on a nation-wide, large scale and gained international traction. Adam Serwer's "The New Construction" publication in The Atlantic October 2020 issue puts it aptly "History teaches us that awakening as such this one is rare." 

And many had wished this awakening would have resulted in change. 

Asia, the Fair & Lovely doctrine and brown skin

East and South Asia have a long, bewildering history of white skin obsession. In between whitening creams, campaigns, advertisements and that aunty who would always ask "why did you get so tanned?" or some variation of it, the majority of the population in Thailand, Philippines, China, Malaysia, India - and what have you - had taken up measures, sometimes drastic, to lighten their skin tones. 

While the history of tribes and people migrating to what we now know as Bangladesh, or India, and forming the "melting pot" of culture is a long and complicated one. At a surface level, we know that the fair-skinned Aryans who are thought to have arrived in India around 1500 BC from Iran and Southern Russia regions started to gentrify the sub-continent, which was predominantly inhabited by Dravidians (darker skinned). 

Adolf Hitler's fascination with Aryans, as a pure and superior race, is telling. The narrative of Aryans follows that of superiority in socioeconomic class. But researchers and historians have even debated the very existence of such a group in this region. 

Skin colour has been long associated with social class. One of the more prominent explanations is that "in Asia, dark skin has long been associated with working in the fields and, therefore, rural poverty. On the other hand, pale skin is associated with living a more comfortable, cosmopolitan life indoors, out of the sun. Skin colour is thus a sign of social class," wrote Ana Salvá in The Diplomat. 

And this obsession remained deep-rooted, and further fueled by colonialism.  

From the first whitening cream in 1919 called "Afghan Snow" in India to the launch of Fair & Lovely cream in 1975, as a dark people, the idea of white skin has always been put up in an illusive pedestal. We have been told, persistently, by advertisements, family and peers that white skin is the unattainable goal which demands sacrifices - such as self-esteem, money and confidence, also physical health (many, to date, continue to go through drastic procedures for white skin). 

So when the summer of 2020 came and bestowed a chance to the world for awakening - Fair & Lovely (and other brands) too came under backlash and said it would change its brand name. The fair cream industry in India was estimated to reach Rs5,000 crore by 2023. But BLM 2020 changed that, reported The Print, an online Indian newspaper. 

But I doubt the kids who called another kid the n-word in a class I was teaching at Jaago over a decade ago or that rickshaw-puller who used the n-word for Black expats walking by at Gulshan 2 avenue some years ago have changed. I doubt conversations at dinner tables have changed much when educated, upper-middle class reject marriage proposals because 'the girl is too dark,' or that the entertainment industry stopped trying to white-tone our people's skin complexion to maintain the widely-held beauty 'standards.'

I doubt anything has substantially really changed. But perhaps it is time that we take up campaigns to promote and appreciate brown skin. 

Perhaps it will take many more generations to rectify this mindset passed down generations from our ancestors. Perhaps the white man will continue walking in places of my city and be at the receiving end of priority, over-exaggerated hospitality by the city's people - forever maintaining the unequal global status quo.  

At the very least, learn the origins of white skin obsessions in the subcontinent. If not anything else, we can start the conversation and break the toxic cycle of imparting the same racist views to the next generation. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard