Like many teenage girls, I went through a K-Pop phase. If you know anything about K-Pop, the amount of content companies push out is crazy compared to many American artists. Just walking through H-Mart, I see famous faces on packages of instant ramen and savory snacks. In the digital realm, there’s a constant output of Instagram stories, TikTok dances, and YouTube videos. While the industry is often seen as harmful in perpetuating malicious standards of body image, a darker threat also finds a vessel in the business: colorism.
Defined as “prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group,” colorism often gets lost in conversation, especially when compared to its violent counterpart, racism, but the effects are more than evident in real life and in fiction.
As a Chinese American, staying pale was an unsaid expectation during my childhood. On the walk home from school with my grandma, she always carried an umbrella for us, urging my sister and I to stay out of the sun while we walked. In other Asian cultures, skin bleaching and whitening creams are advertised by celebrities, further perpetuating harmful beauty standards. Colorism does not exist in a vacuum though, it’s a product of long histories of classism. In China, upper class elites didn’t have to spend time toiling away under the sun, allowing their skin to stay pale and unmarred. Comparatively, those in the working class spent hours in the sun. Thus, the color of one’s skin was once again used to create barriers and exclusion within society. In the U.S., South Asians often face racism to a greater degree, especially online. On his segment of The Daily Show, Ronny Chieng sparked controversy after his comment that “Indians are not Asians.” While this rhetoric has been treated as a joke and even made into a comedy show, it also illustrates the underlying bias in Asia that lighter-skinned people are superior to their darker-skinned counterparts, viewing them as “other.”
In fiction, Asian films also maintain these stereotypes. For example, Peik Lin Goh, portrayed by Awkwafina, in Crazy Rich Asians uses African American Vernacular English (AAVE). As a result, her “Blaccent” sparked controversy online, bringing attention to how Asians often view Black Americans: inferior to themselves. Black Americans and their culture find themselves as the butt of the joke, something to make fun of and profit off of. To make it worse, non-Black people of color who use AAVE feel their language is less harmful than their white counterparts, but that is not the case. In fact, light-skinned Asians such as Awkwafina benefit from colorism, allowing them to assimilate into white culture while maintaining their cultural identity.
Ultimately, colorism is a byproduct of centuries of colonialism and classism, and continues to exert effects on everyday life. While it would be stupid to assume that one solution could fix everything, simply learning about it is just the first step into dismantling harmful stereotypes that pervade society.