25
LAST summer, an article surfaced on the website brit.co that was titled, ‘These are the Most Beautiful Women in the World, According to Science’. Like others of its ilk in the age of clickbait, the article focused on getting scrolling thumbs to pause and even click. It got that and more; within a little while the article was picked up by other websites such as womansday.com and from there it floated around in cyberspace until last week, when it was resurrected by cosmpolitan.com. Its thesis in this, the West’s xenophobic moment, tempts in the name of scientific objectivity its target audience of mostly white women: it’s not just white people who believe that white women are the most beautiful of all, it is actually science.
The ‘science’ that the article rests its claim on is of course not science at all. Like most rubbish journalism that has recently married rubbish science, it presents what looks like science and hopes to pass it off as the real thing. At its core is the premise that symmetrical features equal beauty, which is then used to arrive at a ratio based on facial measurements. Those with the highest degree of facial symmetry, it is then concluded, are the most beautiful, and a list of the ten women who have the highest ratios is supplied for good measure. Actress Amber Heard comes in first; Marilyn Monroe barely makes it in at number nine. There are no black women, South Asian women or Asian women on the list. The message is clear: white and beautiful are synonymous; and it’s not just a ‘cultural judgement’ but actual objective science that is saying so.
There is, in fact, little science in the article. It reproduces the ‘research’ of a doctor named Julian De Silva (who notably runs a centre for plastic surgery) who used computer image mapping (likely the same sort he uses to convince women they need plastic surgery) and a supposed principle of Greek philosophy called the golden ratio to determine ‘ideal facial measurements’. Earlier incarnations of just this sort of science, some may recall, have been used to argue that white people are the smartest, most fit for leadership, the rulers of the world — in short, the worthy oppressors of everyone else. The presentation of white supremacy as the product of science is an old trick, long used to justify all sorts of intrusions.
The curse of one’s lesser whiteness is one to be overcome, and entire social systems exist to help these delusions along.
One would expect that the non-white peoples of the world, even with their smaller megaphones and their limited control over the global narrative, would baulk at articles such as these and take apart their thinly veiled racism. There is at least no danger of this happening in Pakistan or even South Asia at large. The reason is simple: so steeped are brown-skinned people of the subcontinent in their own delusions regarding gradations of skin colour, the differences between wheatish and darkish, that they forget that no one, not a single soul in the rest of the world, considers even the lightest-skinned of them to be white.
The ‘whites’ of the subcontinent don’t believe this at all. When they read an article such as this one, they imagine themselves the Helen Mirrens of the world (she appears high on the list) and express easy and visible disdain for all the actually brown people who live around them, many of whom find such articles to be racist. These delusions are upheld by the efforts of those actually brown people who either bleach themselves into whiteness, or procure lighter-skinned wives, daughters-in-law, employees and ultimately children. The curse of one’s lesser whiteness is one to be overcome, and entire social systems and grooming paraphernalia exist to help these delusions along. Nor is there only aesthetic judgement in this; a slew of moral aspersions are also tagged to the dark-skinned who are, in popular culture and discourse, routinely and uncritically associated with being deceptive, dumb and generally inferior in a multitude of ways.
There is a price to pay for these delusions, for the idea that some among the many varied shades of brown are actually white, descendants somehow of the great white colonialists that descended upon the subcontinent several hundred years ago. Much is written again and again about throwing off the Western yoke and of the depredations that era in history visited upon the glorious rulers of the subcontinent. Indeed, conservatives and nationalists in Pakistan are always eager to express their disdain for most things Western; everything, that is, except the obdurate worship of whiteness as goodness and loveliness.
All of it suggests a pointed and deluded self-hatred, a failure to consider brown skin, which is all skin in Pakistan, beautiful. Its consequence is the continued global dominance of whiteness, the relegation of everyone else and everything else to the margins of cultural production, history and global dominance. When those who must rebel and renounce the existing order of things cannot themselves see beyond the arbitrary and unfounded gradations of inferiority that it entails, no progress is possible. So solid is the entrenchment of whiteness within cultural discourse that most reading this article will immediately imagine that its critique against whiteness as the ultimate in loveliness was wrought by its author’s own exclusion from that category. The contents of this article and its argument are directed particularly at them.
Racism and the shade-ism it has bred in countries like Pakistan destroys not from without but from within. Those born within their borders are saddled with the burden of inferiority and self-hatred, the idea that simply because of the colour of their skin, they are less beautiful, less moral and less deserving. The West may revel in its racism, but the rest of us, at the very least, should call it out for the injustice it represents.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, March 15th, 2017
