The Complex of Complexion

A few weeks ago, while I was communicating with a client from Kenya, I received a message from him that was by all standards normal, but it hit me pretty hard. The message was this:

“Okay 👍🏾”

As you might have guessed already, what made me wonder was not the word okay, but the dark-toned thumbs-up emoji. I had known for a long time that the emojis now came in different color tones, but I hadn’t seen them being used except in two colors. One, the generic yellow one 👍, and the other lightest one 👍🏻 . The generic yellow one makes complete sense as that was the only color available earlier and is still the default option, but the common usage of light-toned emojis among us brown people (Yes, Pakistanis are brown!) is what struck me hard.

The issue here is not being white or black or brown. The Africans are black, but they are okay with that. The problem is that we brown people do not accept that we are brown. This fear resides deep inside our subconscious minds that being dark-toned is something inferior, something derogatory. This is the issue with us: we are not okay with who we are.

In just grade 3 or 4, we proudly teach our children that “A white has no superiority over black, nor a black has any superiority over white, except by righteousness.” This powerful message could have shattered away our long-held fears cultivated by White colonizers, but the only way for that was for us to unapologetically accept who we were and be proud of that. But instead, we accepted weakness. Instead of bravely admitting our actual identity, we chose infidelity in order to gain small favors. We tried our best (and sadly, are still trying) to imitate them because we are afraid of being declared an outcast.

I still tend to think about what those people think who are involved in promoting this idea. The people involved with the cosmetics and beauty industry, the makers of whitening soaps and fairness creams, I wonder, do they know how racist they are? The whole folks in Pakistani media and marketing industry, do they know how racist they are when they only allow people with (relatively) white-toned skin to appear in media? And even when they invite celebrities such as sportsmen in their ads, they try to “whiten” them as much as they can. Have these people ever thought about it consciously? If so, what did they conclude? What excuse did they find? And if they didn’t give it a thought, then that’s a whole different problem, but no less serious.

However, the issue does not only persist in that “influencing” part of society. It resides in the middle class, the common people. What fascinates them about the upper class is not their education, neither their productivity, nor their intellectuality, but their glamor, their appearance, their “makeup”, and their whiteness. What’s even more disturbing is what a common person pursues in his/her (or their child’s) supposed life partner is the fairness of their skin. I mean, what will someone get out of the fairness of skin of his/her life partner? What value will that skin color add to their relationship? In fact, why does it matter at all?

That makes me wonder about beauty. What is beauty? Is beauty something absolute or a subjective idea of mind? Or more realistically a definition set up by society? If beauty is something subjective, then why has all of humanity always found nature to be beautiful, the stars to be charming, and the flowers to be glamorous? This universal beauty of nature makes me think that there is some absolute concept of beauty that roots from a common origin, but we have blurred the idea. We have created a whole mess around it, just out of our fears. Beauty lies in flowers not only due to their mathematically proportionate artistic design but also out of their sublime fragrance. We admire stars not only due to their contrasting sparkles in the dark night, but because of the guidance they provide us in our journeys to the unknown (whether inside the planet as in ancient times, or out in the universe as nowadays).

So, beauty is neither about appearance nor about the soul, it’s about how well the two get together with each other. So whatever color you are, if you are not happy with who you are, you will seem ugly just as you think about yourself. But if you consider yourself beautiful, from the outside and the inside, not because how society thinks you are but because how you perceive yourself and believe in an absolute beauty of soul that comes from nature or from an Absolute Reality, then you will seem beautiful.

But again, to whom? To no one. Because it isn’t about what seems but about what is.