Blinded by the White
19 July 2010
I've been meaning to write a blog post about the culture of 'whiteness' for a long time, but never quite found the words. Instead, I'm going to link you to my friend Megan's recent post: Obsession with White and Fiona's recent: Don't Judge a Bule by her Color.
In short, Indonesians are consumed with the idea of being pale, and most skin products are marketed as 'skin-brightening' or 'whitening'. The notion of white as beautiful is absolutely blatant; no one tries to hide their preference for paleness because it's not really considered politically incorrect. Perhaps this is because Indonesia has a different history of slavery than the US--Javanese people were exported as slaves under colonial rule to other Dutch colonies, including South Africa and Suriname.
A brief anecdote: my roommate, Lisa, is a tall and quite fair-skinned redhead. It's pretty typical even in Jogja for her to get attention based on her 'foreign beauty, but the obsession was even stronger while she was traveling on the island of Borneo (the Indonesian part of which is called Kalimantan). When Lisa's friend Griffin asked the locals in Borneo, 'What about Lisa is so beautiful?' they answered:
3 comments:
One of the reasons why Indonesian likes "paleness" is also because the cultural/social orientation on Kraton. There are things called, says: patriakh or nobility or higher social class on there. The "Culture" of Kraton is "considered" as higher than the "common" class. It is also the same whith the "foreigners" class in the the Dutch Colonial Era. The "common" people were taught that the "Kraton" class or the "Wong Londo" (How Javanese calls Orang Belanda/Dutch, -- the term of "Londo" also has similar meaning/asociation with the term of Bule) was higher than "common people". So the common people attempted to learn/imitate the "higher" class' "style" of living. In this situation, women of Kraton was considered to have better skin and better treatment. They were living "under" Kraton, their skin was not as "dark" as "common women" who worked in the Sawah, Kebun and under the sun. Living far from the sun was better than working under the sun. So "clean skin" was better than dirt, mud, etc. The women of Kraton also had standard treatment for their "beauty". One hand the "treatment" is a special "heritage" of the country but in other hand is a "kind" of standard style for every woman that beautiful skin or "beautiful life" must the same with what belonged by the nobel woman of Kraton. The "paradigm" is absored by most of woman in Java through culture. White (Bule, Kraton) is better than the dark, a cultural reason or a "social" reason.
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dari Geger (wah sulitnya "share" opini dalam Bahasa Inggris)
And different standards of and approaches to beauty prevail in Sumatra: my pointy nose always gets much comment and more attention than my skin tone. But, inevitably, the topic of skin color comes up: indeed, some people have nicknames for tone color, like "kuniang" (yellow). One of the women I work with was musing about what would happen if they traveled to the US to perform, saying surely people would comment and say they were ugly because they were so dark-skinned. To dissuade them skin color wouldn't be the focus, I should them a picture of me with my Kenyan boyfriend, who is extremely dark-skinned. That got a lot of attention and lessened the focus on skin color.
Thanks for your comments, Geger and Jeni... the skin color issue is incredibly complex and different throughout Indonesia; my cursory note was sort of a cheap way of getting out of a tough issue.
Even in the U.S., I know that some communities of color consider lighter skin to be more beautiful, and the artificial tanning habits of some other people is bizarre indeed.
I think the main difference between the U.S. and here is that people are a lot more blunt in Indonesia. Even when in the U.S. value is assigned to skin color, you just would never hear someone say, "Wow you are SO black!" Not verbalizing but still holding judgements isn't better, but the effect of hearing the words spoken here is still shocking to me.
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