Colourism is a form of discrimination prevalent in all over the world. From the birth of the civilisation, it has been recognised as a distinct form of discrimination which eventually led to a number of movements. Certainly, Nelson Mandela’s name comes to our minds when we raise our voices against colour based discrimination.
Colourism can be defined as discrimination based on skin colour in which human beings are treated differently based on the social meanings attached to their skin colour. In the context of our country, colourism plays a vital role, especially in a girl’s life, which truly depicts that our mentality is very stereotypical. However, such a socially acknowledged type of racial detection is indeed very problematic. Particularly, when the notion of whiteness is strongly associated with elements of “purity” and “fairness” while blackness is more allied to “dirt” and “evil.”
In print, online and electronic media we often come across dominant messages that advertising companies are sending to people. They try to portray dark-skinned people as inferior, less beautiful, less competent, less intelligent, and less accomplished than light-skinned people. The main purpose of the advertisers is to promote their products by conveying a message through these ads. These ads attempt to convince people that they are incomplete without a particular product. Thus it affects the psychology of the dark-skinned people and they tend to feel deficient and suffer from low self-esteem.
Moreover, another common fact we often experience is that majority of media, eg television programmes, movies, and advertisements choose to represent fair skinned people. According to those ads, fair skinned people tend to have higher social standing, more positive networks, and more opportunities to succeed than those of people with darker skin tones. Additionally, we see that blackness is always associated with elements of “dirt” and “evil” things such as “black money,” “black laws,” etc.
This notion of colourism affects dark-skinned children’s performance at school because their confidence level goes down and they feel they are not good enough to compete with their fair-skinned counterparts. When it comes to marriage, we again find skin colour playing a prominent role; sometimes girls are rejected or ignored by the in-law’s family just because of the darkness of their skin. We even see skin-colour based discrimination within the families. Sometimes elders and other family members tell a dark-skinned girl that “you will never get married,” or “who will marry you?,” or “you will not get picked for dances or other public events,” etc. From these negative experiences they start considering themselves as inferior, and think that they will never have success in personal or professional life.
However, colour as a ground for discrimination is prohibited in the equality clause of the constitution of Bangladesh through Article 28(1). Although constitution only talks about discrimination based on religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, but colour is conventionally grouped with race when unfair discrimination is in question (Article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination). Moreover, international instruments also prohibited the discrimination based on any specific colour, such as Article 2 of UDHR and ICCPR, and Article 14 of ECHR.
Challenging such discrimination, an Indian NGO called Women of Worth delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures to the cosmetics company “Emami,” calling on them to withdraw a particularly discriminatory advert for “Fair and Handsome.” However, the company refused to remove the ad.
Nevertheless, an Indian organisation recently proposed a new regulation to control such discrimination. The new rules propose that ads should not directly or implicitly show dark people as unattractive, unhappy, depressed or concerned, should not portray people with darker skin are at a disadvantage, should not associate skin colour with any particular socio-economic class, ethnicity or community, and should not show gender based discrimination because of skin colour.
In Bangladesh, we do not have any such specific regulation to control discriminative ads. And, we are yet to see the result of the Indian proposal provided by the Advertising Standards Council of India as it has not been passed yet.
Colour discrimination always dispirits the youth to nourish their inborn talent. In order to eliminate this menace the areas of protection against unfair discrimination based on skin colour should be regulated properly. Simultaneously, proper legal attention should be paid to persons living under discriminative positions. Moreover, we all have to begin to realise that our skin, no matter the shade, is always beautiful. We should work on bringing common sense, self-pride and economic self-determination to our own community. How can we expect others to respect us and our dark skins, if we ourselves do not practise the same?
