- 14 hours ago
- #india
- #obsessed
- #whiteskin
#India #obsessed #whiteskin
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TechTranscript
00:17Let's go back in time for a second, all the way back to our early childhood, when everything
00:24was simpler. You're making your first ever self-portrait and this is pivotal. You want
00:32to get it right. So you take out your crayons and pull out the piece labelled skin colour.
00:43You start filling it neatly but then, hmm. You take the crayon and place it on your arm
00:51to fact check and there it is. Your first ever brush with colourism. Your first time thinking
00:58that there was something wrong with you.
01:11Hello man. Hello. Can't lie this train is looking rough.
01:16We're staying just outside the city and it really doesn't feel that chaotic right now.
01:27Okay, so I've been seeing a lot of foreigners blogging in India lately.
01:32What? Yeah. I'm hungry for some spicy food.
01:38So we are now for the first time on an official workshop.
01:41This man is treating me right.
01:45Most or at least many of them are white and they are always subjected to one of two things.
01:51First is Ghora tax.
01:53How much? 20 rupees.
01:54No, no, no. 20 rupees.
01:56Ah, ah, Ghora price. Ghora price.
01:59Which I guess is not great but also karmic in a sense.
02:03And the second? Worship.
02:05Literally randos on the street approach them with requests for selfies.
02:09Now these people are not celebrities. They are not influencers.
02:13They are just white.
02:16And somehow that's enough.
02:18This is widespread by the way.
02:20Foreign influencers farm millions of views just by mentioning India and their title.
02:26There are so many videos where they react to Indian content and earn a ton.
02:29Why?
02:30Because it's guaranteed to get high engagement.
02:33So many homes.
02:34And all of this wouldn't have worked me so much if it wasn't for the flip side.
02:39Let me show you something, okay?
02:41Just type Pajit into the search bar and you will get an idea of how we are often treated in
02:47the West.
02:48Now Pajit is a slur that started on 4chan around 2015.
02:51But now it's everywhere and is used alongside every stereotype you can imagine.
02:58Hygiene, math, or IT biz and most of all it's an attack on the color of our skin.
03:03Now, I don't get it.
03:06Why exactly do we pedestalize whiteness?
03:09Why is it that we have people saying,
03:11Oh, this person's fair.
03:13They'll find it easier to get a partner.
03:15Oh, you should have turmeric and milk for fair skin and a good life and other bullshit like that.
03:19Did we always dislike our skin?
03:22Or is it just a British colonial hangover?
03:24The more threads we pulled, the more we realized how deep it really goes.
03:29Colorism is embedded in our marriage markets and even our children's media.
03:35And it's kind of enraging to know that all of it started with a very deliberate campaign by the British
03:40to make us hate ourselves.
03:42I wanna take you through everything that we found, especially the science behind why we all have different skin.
03:49Not just globally, but even within India, we have 50 shades of brown.
03:54And tracing that led me to the story of how our people were formed.
04:00And all of it confirmed one thing.
04:03Racism is a hallucination and I have proof.
04:12Let's go back in time to our very roots.
04:15You see, one of the points of pride of our nation is that we host one of the oldest continuously
04:20spoken language on the planet.
04:22That's Tamil.
04:23And within this ancient language's literature, we have some of the earliest documented poetry in human history.
04:29The Sangam period, that's roughly 300 BCE, produced eight principal anthologies.
04:36Most of them fall into the Akam category.
04:40That's private romantic poetry.
04:42Now, one such collection of poems is called Kuruntogai.
04:45And these poems feature dark-skinned heroines and they were worshipped.
04:49There's a phrase that appears again and again,
04:52Yen maa mai kavine.
04:53Which translates to, my dark beauty.
04:57This wasn't a niche, it was the standard back then.
05:00Now, let's rewind further all the way back to one of our most revered deities, Krishna.
05:06So, his name, Krishna, literally means dark in Sanskrit.
05:10Much down the line, his name would be poetically reinterpreted as one who attracts everyone.
05:16But, etymologically, it's darkness.
05:19The Bhagavata Purana repeatedly describes Krishna's body as Neel Omega Syama,
05:25which is dark blue like a monsoon cloud.
05:28Over time, painters used vivid blue pigment as a visual shorthand to symbolize his divinity
05:34and that gave rise to our modern-day interpretation of him.
05:38That is about a billion people worshipping a god whose darkness is explicitly framed as the source of his beauty
05:45while also often feeling ashamed of their own skin tones.
05:50Now, the beauty of our dark skin is a definitive trait of our history
05:53and it has been documented very very well, not just by us, but also by the rest of the world.
06:00For us, blackness was beauty perfected.
06:03In the 13th century, Marco Polo wrote down his observations while travelling through India.
06:09The images of their deities, they represent black, but the devil, they paint white
06:14and assert that all demons are of that colour.
06:18Now, cut to today and we want selfies with a random white person to show up on a horribly titled
06:24WhatsApp group.
06:25Clearly, we've had 50 shades of pride in our skin colour throughout history.
06:29We simply knew better. For thousands of years, we knew better.
06:34Which means, at some point, everything flipped. And that brings me to...
06:44Now, I need to be careful here because some historians point out that colour-based preferences existed in India before
06:52colonialism.
06:52And they're right, kind of. The Sanskrit word, Varna, often translated as caste, literally means colour.
07:00But modern research shows that in ancient texts, Varna refers to symbolic colours.
07:06Brahmins associated with white for purity, Kshatriyas with red for valour.
07:11These are metaphorical categories, not descriptions of anyone's actual skin.
07:15We've also consistently had dark-skinned Brahmins and fair-skinned Shudras and Dalits throughout.
07:21So, while the caste system has various fundamental issues, the colourism is a by-product of it that existed only
07:28in pockets.
07:28What colonialism did was take these scattered threads and weave them into a system, an institution, a hierarchy backed by
07:37force.
07:38Between 1757 and 1947, the British implemented a deliberate racial hierarchy.
07:44And if that hierarchy had an architect, it was this man, Herbert Hope Risley.
07:50He was the Census Commissioner for the 1901 Indian Census, and he had a theory.
07:55He believed that caste was actually race, and that race could be measured.
08:00Literally measured.
08:02He measured skulls, the length and width of our noses, our skin tones.
08:07And from this data, he created a table that put whiteness and all Eurocentric features at the apex, and dark
08:15skin at the bottom.
08:16This wasn't a fringe theory, this was published in the Census of India.
08:21Administrative rules, educational access, employment opportunities, social clubs, all reserved for lighter-skinned Indians.
08:29In coastal Chennai, the British fortress at Fort St. George was called White Town.
08:35The area outside the walls where Indians lived, that was called Black Town.
08:40Clubs, restaurants, gymnasiums, they had signs that read, dogs and Indians not allowed.
08:47And it's not just Chennai.
08:49This was done in Kolkata, Mumbai, Surat, and any place where they established major administrative centers.
08:55But their genius plan wasn't discrimination, it was to create a feedback loop.
09:00See, first they gave opportunities to lighter-skinned Indians.
09:03Then they pointed to the success of those people as proof that they were superior to others.
09:09Now at that time, our oppressed ancestors couldn't tell that this was a logical fallacy called circular justification.
09:15The colonial adventures of the British had led them to discovering something profoundly dark about human psychology.
09:21Tell someone a lie long enough, and they start to internalize it, believe it.
09:27Do the same at a massive scale, and you can explain our inheritance, this arbitrary shame of ours.
09:34The racial hierarchy the British built was especially frustrating because when you actually break it down,
09:41when you look at what's actually happening underneath our skin,
09:44when you understand the biology behind our color,
09:47you realize that racism, colorism, all these absurdities are stupid.
09:53They're not even real.
09:55But before I get to that, I need to interrupt the story to show you a tool that can help
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11:09Now back to the video.
11:15So our skin has three layers, okay?
11:18The innermost layer is the subcutaneous layer, which is mostly just fat.
11:22Above that, we have the dermis and it's packed with blood vessels, nerves, and hair follicles.
11:27And then comes the outermost layer and our point of focus today, the epidermis.
11:32Why?
11:33Because therein lives the cells that determine the color.
11:36That is the melanocytes.
11:38Now these are specialized cells that produce melanin, the pigment responsible for skin color.
11:43The word melanin comes from Greek word melanos meaning black.
11:47And melanin is an armor that protects you from cancer.
11:52Yup.
11:52So it begins with the sun blazing away and sending rays of light carrying invisible UV radiation.
11:57These penetrate your skin and cause DNA damage, mutations, and even skin cancer.
12:03Now luckily, melanin absorbs that radiation and neutralizes.
12:08The more the melanin, the stronger your armor.
12:11And incidentally, the more the melanin, the darker the skin.
12:15Which is why dark skin has been found to be so much more effective at reducing skin cancer risk than
12:22light skin.
12:22That's not a disadvantage, is it?
12:24But also, I don't want it to seem like one is better than the other because it's actually more of
12:29a trade-off.
12:30When UVB radiation hits your skin, it produces vitamin D which is essential for cold climates.
12:35Because without it, you could get depressed, have weak bones, or face immunity issues.
12:40Darker skin equals lesser vitamin D production.
12:43So like I said, a trade-off.
12:45Now let's zoom out, okay?
12:47And look at what that means really.
12:49When you look at this map, you can observe one of the most striking patterns in human biology.
12:55Skin color correlates directly with latitude.
12:59Populations near the equator, they have more melanin and are dark skinned.
13:03Populations near the poles, lesser melanin, fairer skinned.
13:08That's it.
13:09That's the whole thing.
13:10We are dark because we are closer to the equator.
13:14All the slavery, the apartheid, the colonial empire, the no-dogs in Indian science root back to how close we
13:21are to the equator.
13:23That's how silly and arbitrary this whole thing is.
13:27Okay, so what about all of us?
13:29How did all of us get our particular shades of brown?
13:32How were our people formed?
13:35To understand that, let's rewind again.
13:39We're back in 10,000 BCE, near the end of the last ice age.
13:44The land that we now call India looks a lot different back then.
13:48And it inhabited the ancient ancestral South Indians.
13:52They are representative of the original hunter-gatherers of this land from over 40,000 years ago.
13:59Their genes have survived all the way to today and are present in nearly all Indians.
14:04This is our first heritage and their skin due to high melanin levels was likely quite dark.
14:11Then, about 5,000 years ago, the Bronze Age kicked in.
14:15New people started arriving from the northwest.
14:19Most of them were farmer herders from areas around the Iranian plateau.
14:23And since they were further from the equator, they required relatively lesser melanin, which meant a light brownish skin tone.
14:31These two populations merged over millennia and set the stage for the Indus Valley civilization to rise.
14:38Then, somewhere between 2,000 to 1,500 BCE, another wave of migration began.
14:44This time, the pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe came over.
14:48And since they came from regions of Europe and Central Asia,
14:51they were likely to be fair-skinned and light-eyed.
14:54Most of them settled in North Indian regions, mixing with the existing populations there
14:59and giving rise to a population that geneticists call the ancestral North Indians.
15:04Cut to 4,000 years later and you'll get 50 shades of brown distributed across the land,
15:12all of it forming our people and what we now call India.
15:17See, we revered this caramel skin of ours throughout history and then came the colonialists.
15:22And sure, it's easy to blame them, but they left in 1947.
15:26And once they did, what did we do exactly?
15:35Post-independence, India was determined to reclaim our heritage, our narratives.
15:40Well, at least some of them were.
15:42The rest were stuck in a hangover.
15:44Did you know that the very first commercially available fairness cream in India was the Afghan Snow?
15:50Created by E.S. Patanwala in 1999, it literally became a status symbol among the elite Indian women
15:57or so the British wanted us to think.
15:59That sentiment carried on, spread its roots, and in 1978, Hindustan Unilever launched fair and lovely
16:07a melanin suppressor.
16:08Now, these were creams that were marketed with the power to change your life, get a better job,
16:14a nicer husband, and to be noticed.
16:16Even after receiving criticism, they simply renamed the cream into Glow and Lovely.
16:22To be fair, it's an ingenious business model.
16:25They sold colorism because they knew that it was a market that would continue to grow for another century or
16:30so.
16:30And they were right.
16:32Today, the global skin lightening market is worth over $10 billion.
16:37India alone accounts for 5,000 crores of it.
16:41And yes, we lead the world in consumption and in the growth rate.
16:45What sucks is that I can't even blame the people who buy this cream.
16:48Why?
16:49Because they're not being irrational.
16:51See, the people who buy these creams are influenced by the real bads of Hollywood.
16:56Now, we all know that the film industry has a ton of issues,
17:00but I wanted to see if it has been getting better over the years.
17:04Article 15, a film explicitly about caste discrimination, darkened actress Sayani Gupta's skin with makeup to make her look more
17:13Dalit.
17:13Bala, a 2019 film tackling insecurities around balding and dark skin, cast Bhumi Pednekar in it and darkened her skin
17:21so she fits the role.
17:22Lapata Ladies, India's official entry for last year's Oscars, is also culpable of the same brown face.
17:29Look, I get that sometimes you need a star attached to a project to get it green-lit.
17:33Gully Boy, Highway, Super 30, all had brown faces.
17:36But without it, the film probably couldn't have seen the light of day.
17:40It's a necessity.
17:40But at least when the entire point of film is to be progressive,
17:45they're gonna try and not use regressive means to get there, right?
17:48Forget Bollywood.
17:48Let's look at children's media.
17:50What are they watching?
17:55Everyone's watching Chota Beam.
17:57And who's the villain of the show?
17:59A boy called Kalia.
18:02Yeah, subtle as a jackhammer.
18:04Kalia and his two goons were given a slightly darker shit.
18:07Because, you know, they're the bad guys.
18:10Now, I get that it's probably not going to radicalize children.
18:13But if you're a fat, dark-skinned kid watching that show,
18:17you are somewhere going to grow up thinking you're the side character of your own life.
18:21That's the kind of impact we're dealing with.
18:23Oh, and beyond these industries, there's a far more discreet segregation happening in our society.
18:30Multiple peer-reviewed studies have analyzed Indian matrimonial advertisements and websites.
18:35The pattern is dark.
18:38When men describe themselves, they rarely mention skin tone.
18:41Only about 7% do.
18:43But when women describe themselves,
18:45around 40% include specific skin tone information.
18:49Wheatish.
18:49Fair.
18:50Very fair.
18:51See, men's preferences center on physical appearance, especially skin color.
18:55Women's preferences center on education, profession, income.
18:59And that's where we are at.
19:01There's so much ingrained colorism to combat, to dismantle, to heal from.
19:06Okay, this is all very downbeat.
19:09Don't get me wrong.
19:10We have made a shit ton of progress.
19:12And it's honestly very, very beautiful.
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20:26E.V. Ramaswamy, the founder of the Dravidian Movement,
20:29was calling this out a century ago.
20:31He spent decades arguing that dark-skinned South Indians
20:34should reclaim their identity and their pride,
20:37and his movement shaped Tamil Nadu politics for generations.
20:41In the recent past, the voices got louder.
20:44Sure, yeah, Bollywood has its issues, but it has many champions as well.
20:48Nandita Das has often been at the forefront of the discourse.
20:51She became the face of the Dark is Beautiful campaign
20:54and challenged the fairness industry directly.
20:57Religion or the nationality, everything was a given.
20:59So, why should anybody make me feel smaller?
21:02Then, there's other tiers of vocal artists.
21:05Priyanka Chopra faced backlash for early fairness cream endorsements,
21:08but at the time, she was an outsider trying to break into an incredibly problematic but powerful industry.
21:15Once she earned her own merit and power, she consistently voiced support for reforms.
21:19Now, many critics call it opportunistic.
21:22I don't know, but even if that's true, I don't care.
21:25See, I don't mind when these cloud-chasing YouTubers feed the homeless just for the views,
21:30because the ones not chasing views often don't feed the homeless at all.
21:34Most of all, the Unfair and Lovely campaign gave women a platform to reject this premise entirely.
21:40It has led to so many people reclaiming the power that their darker skin tones inherently possess.
21:47Oh, and finally, there is Gen Z.
21:50Despite all the brain rot content they create,
21:53the way they are reclaiming a rightful narrative is a sight to behold.
21:57Anyone telling you that you are not enough or that you're not beautiful really just hates themselves.
22:02This is a generation that refuses to inherit the sins and shames of the past.
22:07They seem to have the stubbornness and resistance necessary to course-correct.
22:11They don't apologize for who they are, which is lovely and fair.
22:16So, to that I say, f*** the aunties.
22:20Okay, I guess we're in good hands.
22:22But then, I'm also mostly referring to the privileged Gen Z,
22:24not the ones who struggle with these issues even today.
22:27And it won't be until a few more generations down the line that we beat this issue entirely.
22:32Now, I truly, truly wish these kids didn't have to wait this long,
22:36which is why these awareness campaigns, all the repetitive, are still important.
22:41And which is why I feel compelled to advocate for one thing,
22:45that we stop waiting for kids to unlearn shame on their own.
22:49What if we taught them pride earlier?
22:51Pride for our history that exalts the dark beauty of ourselves.
22:54Pride for our skin.
22:55Pride for the melanin and specific biology that we have developed over millennia.
23:00Pride for the inherent value that exists within ourselves.
23:04Every single country that has faced the terrible hand of colonialism
23:07must educate their children of their inherent and historical words.
23:11They have to do so in order to reclaim the self-esteem that was stolen,
23:15but is deserved by all kids around the world.
23:19And then maybe, just maybe, we'll stop seeking validation in foreign grounds
23:24and stop this Gora worship and Gora attack BS once and for all.
23:37Guys, no. Just look at me. I shouldn't be doing this.
23:40They're going to say who the hell are you to talk about issues of dark skin.
23:44I got it.
23:45I think we can fix this,
23:46if you just put makeup on your face and make you dark skinned.
23:50You're fired.
23:52Or...
23:53For this video,
23:55can't we hire someone with a darker complexion?
23:58That could work, right?
23:59No, that feels wrong.
24:01Like, tokenism at best.
24:03Feels like we're trying to avoid getting cancelled.
24:12Shivadarshini, what do you think?
24:18Achila, believe in yourself!
24:23Let's go!
24:29***