Hi, xoJane. It is I, Brown Girl Faz.
The first time I experienced racism was in a classroom when I was
nine years old. I didn’t know what was happening, but I understood that
there was a lot of hate there while my teacher loomed over me and said,
“You know why I didn’t call on you to answer my questions? Because your
skin is black.”
She spat the word black like it gave her boils.
I’m from Singapore. One of the richest nations in the world, touted
as a cultural and religious melting pot with racially harmonious
Rainbow Brites running around throwing glitter in the air. I’m calling
bullshit. I have never felt like I belonged in this country a single day
of my life.
Products that are supposed to
whiten your vaginas
may be new to the beauty market in Asia, but the correlation between
dark skin and "dirtiness" is not anything new. You don’t even have to
look further than the makeup counters and drugstores –- no colors exist
after a certain shade of beige.
I should explain the racial make-up of Singapore:
It is a country of 5 million people, with Chinese making up 74% of
the population, Malays -13%, Indians - 9% and the rest are Eurasians and
other minority ethnicities. Right from the time you are born, your ID
tells you what race you are. Nobody identifies themselves as Singaporean
first; your racial identity is what you are first and foremost.
I was already a cultural mess to begin with -– unlike most of
Singapore whose first languages are their arterial languages (i.e., the
Chinese speak Mandarin, the Malays speak Malay, Indians speak Tamil), I
come from an English-speaking Indian family.
So while kids hung out with other kids who spoke their mother
tongue at recess, I spent my lunchtime solo with a peanut butter and
jelly sandwich and Enid Blyton.
In hindsight, what appalls me most is not how merciless my peers
were in school, but how many of the educators were equally if not more
vindictive. The teacher I mentioned earlier? She taught me English, Math
and Science for two years and made me sit by myself right at the back
of the class. The whole two years I was made to feel worthless and
disgusting, and the entire time I thought it was my fault.
I was to blame because I had skin that matches the earth. I deserved it all.
When I was 11, we were told to write poetry and present it in
class. A boy wrote about me. Not a sappy puppy love letter, mind you –-
it was a poem about how fat I was, how black I was and how I was a mess,
I shouldn’t exist. Instead of doing anything about it, the teacher (a
different one) laughed with him and with the rest of the class.
High school was no exception of course. People tend to think that
just because I’m Indian, I couldn’t speak anything else other than
Indian languages but my multi-lingual background allowed me into a world
where people spoke about you in languages they thought you didn’t
understand.
Let me tell you –- oblivion can be blissful. I can never erase the
things people have said about me in front of me just because they
thought I wouldn’t understand.
The only dark skinned girl in the room
At 15, when my self-esteem was probably at its lowest, I walked
past a bunch of guys talking openly about me: “If Faz were fairer, she’d
be pretty.”
Keling (the Indian equivalent of n*gger). Burnt. Black skin. Dirty. I’ve been called the worst names from fellow Singaporeans.
It’s funny because one of the lines in the Singapore pledge is “We
are the citizens of Singapore… Regardless of race, language or
religion.” You’d recite this pledge every morning in school for at least
10 years of your life, but who actually means what they pledge?
Which is why I love being in the US –- there's foundation that
matches my skin, I see Indian, Chinese and African-American people on TV
and I don’t feel like people are constantly judging me based on the
color of my skin.
While I work and surround myself with people who never look at my
skin color as something that defines me, I walked into an elevator just
last week and had two guys talking about me in Malay. Of course I told
them off as I stepped out, but it’s so disheartening.
I spent an hour looking through local magazines for a dark-skinned
person and I couldn’t find any. What I could find were pages and pages
of whitening products. Minority races on the main English TV channel are
never main characters -– they are usually obese and made fun of (don’t
get me started about how I’m a US Size 8 and “obese” in Asia).
Cross-racial elation going on here y’all
For now, as far as I’m concerned, I know it starts with me. I will
call anybody out for racism, I will continue writing and featuring
people of all colors and sizes in my work, I will teach my children that
your skin is something you should be so proud of because skin itself is
a miracle, no matter what shade of awesome you are.
One day maybe Singapore will follow suit.
KUALA LUMPUR: Three police personnel were charged at the Magistrates Court here today for alleged involvement in the death-in-custody of N Dhamendran.
