--- ritu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Deborah Harrell wrote:
>
[I don't recall who asked this - sorry!]
> > > You mean, the people from India with brown skin
> > > colour? I think
> > > they were lumped with the whites, among the
> Aryans.
> >
> > In South Africa I think they were called
> > "colored"...didn't this influence Gandhi, IIRC?
>
> Yes. He spent 21 years in South Africa and started
> forming his theories
> of Satyagraha in South Africa itself. He was thrown
> out of railway
> carriage because of his skin colour and that was,
> approximately, the
> moment he stopped worrying about his law practice
> and started thinking
> in terms of freedom, satyagraha, non-cooperation.
> His first Satyagraha
> was organised in SA in 1907 and 7 years after that,
> the SA govt had
> agreed to his proposals for the alleviation of
> anti-Indian discrimination.
> He arrived in India in 1915 and started working for
> India's freedom.
Thanks for the clarification.
>
> > Different ethnic group, but in the US Southwest,
> > brown-skinned Mexicans were (and still are, in
> >some eyes) considered 'inferior.' >:/
>
> People are weird. You wouldn't believe how important
> 'fair' skin is here
> in India - the matrimonials inevitably mention it,
> there are creams and
> lotions which claim to make you fairer in 14 days,
> the description of
> beauty usually starts with the word 'gori' [fair
> again]..... And these
> are the people who aren't even 'white' to begin
with!
I don't know if it's still true today, but
African-Americans with light skin used to 'look down
on' those with truly dark skin.
More weirdness: when I was a teenager, girls used to
'lay out' in the sun to get a really dark tan (I just
burned, and even today with sunscreen of SPF45 I
merely lose that 'fish-belly whiteness' after a summer
of working outdoors). And many white people still do,
or use a tanning booth, or a skin _darkener_
("tan-in-a-bottle"). Then there are chemicals to curl
the hair, straighten the hair, lighten the hair,
darken the hair...
Still, we seem to be heading in the 'doesn't matter'
direction, although there's a long way to go yet.
Debbi
who has a pale "farmer's tan" (neck, and arms from the
elbows to the fingers) :)
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