AU Magazine Issue 3

PHOTO JOURDAN DUNN FROM MISS VOGUE, APRIL 2014 PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANGELO PENNETTA
OPINIONS
IT’S JUST
PLAIN
RACISM
WRITTEN BY MAHEK TULSIANI
WHAT’S A GIRL
GOING TO THINK
WHEN SHE ALL SHE SEES
IS SKIN-WHITENING
PRODUCTS ALL DAY?
“BUT EVEN TODAY,
IN 2015, IT IS HARD
FOR WOMEN OF
COLOR TO OPEN A
MAGAZINE AND BE
ABLE TO SEE
OURSELVES
THERE. “
I REMEMBER GOING to an Indian grocery store with
my mother when I was five years old, complaining about
being dragged along for her errands. She was just
picking up some ingredients for dinner that night, but I was
kind of an impatient kid. To pass the time, I browsed the
aisles, obviously not looking for anything in particular, and
stumbled across a whole range of skin whitening products.
When you’re five years old, that kind of thing gets
internalized pretty quickly. So did the fact that, in the
Philippines, where I lived for all of my formative years, is
rampant with advertisements for skin lightening products.
In America, you don’t see much of that. But it’s really not that
different, in the end. People love tanning, but pretty much only
on white people. When I open fashion magazines, I hardly ever
have the privilege of seeing skin as dark as mine, let alone an
“ethnic” looking nose like mine, or bone structure like mine.
I’m not going to sugarcoat the reasons why this
is the case, because it’s just plain racism. And it’s
well-documented, too. British Vogue has had exactly
one black cover girl in the last twelve years, the beautiful
Jourdan Dunn, who herself has spoken out about racism
in the fashion industry, sharing experiences about shows
refusing to book black models and makeup and hair “professionals”
who refuse to work with dark skin and textured hair.
It’s wonderful that there are role models like
Jourdan Dunn for young women of color to look up
to, but even today, in 2015, it is hard for women of
color to open a magazine and be able to see ourselves there.
Fashion does not only belong to white people. It belongs
to everyone. That’s part of its beauty, that it is an art form
that everyone can take to their everyday lives. So why do
magazines and fashion shows tell such a different story?
Representation matters to little girls who open magazines
and spend their lives thinking they aren’t beautiful because
they don’t look like the girls there. It matters to young women
who would like to be in the fashion industry but can’t
see a place for themselves there. It matters to adults who
continue to have the fashion industry tell them every day that
they are not as beautiful or desirable as their white counterparts.
It’s taken a really long time and a lot of work for me to embrace
my dark skin, my ethnic features, and my Indian heritage, and
that’s really not fair. As women of color, we deserve better. We
deserve to have the world recognize that we are beautiful, too.
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