Brown Baby

by Nikesh Shukla

  A consistent thing you said throughout your entire childhood was that you didn’t like the colour brown. It was too dark. Another time you told me it was dirty. Recently, you told me you wished I was white.

  ‘Then I will be white,’ you said.

  ‘Why?’ I replied.

  ‘I want to be like Mummy,’ you said before disappearing into another room, as if that was that and there was nothing more to say.

  Colourism in South Asian communities is a huge problem. A huge societal problem that, sadly, makes a shitload of money. The fairer you are, the more value society places onto you, as a prospective spouse, in job opportunities, in terms of whether you’re a good person or not. In India alone, the skin-lightening industry attracts over 735 million consumers across a population of 1.35 billion people. That’s more than half the people in the country using some sort of skin-bleaching product to make themselves look lighter. That proximity to whiteness, it’s a hell of a drug.

  My mum would make us use a high-factor suncream every summer so we didn’t get too dark. Comments about how people look would invariably mention their skin tone. One of my cousins was very handsome, so fair, so lovely, just like the skin-bleaching cream. Another was so dark, maybe that’s why they were unmarried for so long. The ‘casual’ condemnation of people with darker tones is a powerful inward-projecting self-hatred, a racism of self, one that pushes us as close to white people as it can muster.

  An advert for detergent in China was pulled in 2016 for its racist colourist depiction of purity. A woman forces a pouch of Qiaobi cleaning liquid into a Black man’s mouth before he is bundled into a washing machine and put on a cleaning cycle. When he emerges, he is now a smiling Asian man, and the slogan appears: Change begins with Qiaobi.

  Colourism for us, for South Asians, has some roots in colonialism. During British rule, dark-skinned Indians were seen as less than able, and thus lighter-skinned Indians were prioritized for jobs. You just have to look at the Bollywood stars over the last twenty years to see that this never went away. And while things are changing, we still have a history of Bollywood actresses who are white-passing and often lightened on film posters to contend with. I read a story online about a group of young girls in Maharastra training to be flight crew through a government scholarship programme that aimed to empower women. The majority of girls were denied employment due to their darker skin tone; a few of those women found work, but only as out-of-sight ground crew.

  To say you don’t like the colour brown is to state a preference, a priority of a palette of colours. You prefer bright colours, you say. You like pink and red and orange and yellow. The darker colours are not your favourite. You hate brown. Context weighs heavily on situations but so does history. Societal norms pervade in ways we cannot always see. You may be talking about felt tip pens. But you are also talking about the last two hundred years of history. You may be four but you are perpetuating tropes you are yet to even comprehend.

  Your grandmother buys you a doll from America: Patty. Patty is a mixed-race doll, her skin tone is a . . . I pause here for a second because as I try to describe her skin colour, I realize all I have is sweet-based food options. That fetished, ‘edible’ stereotype. Skin colour delicious to eat. I nearly wrote caramel-skinned. But I would never describe Boris Johnson as having skin like boiled rice, so why compare Patty’s beautiful hue to a food? It’s demeaning. And lazy. And yet it’s the first image that comes to mind, Ganga. What have I even internalized? Patty is a brown doll, a beautiful brown doll. She smiles. Her hair is straight but thick, in pigtails.

  She lies on the floor unused for months. We find her in the most random places. Shoved down the side of your bed, in your wardrobe, at the back of your cubby hole under the stairs, under some cushions, behind my armchair. We never see you playing with her. Part of the reason is you’re just not that into dolls. Your Baby Annabel also goes neglected. But Baby Annabel is never left in the same random places as Patty. Baby Annabel accumulates dust in and amongst some bits and bobs in a box. Meanwhile, Patty is actively hidden.

  I don’t particularly realize it’s an issue for a long time. In my ignorance that there is a problem, I just find her in odd places and rescue her, leaving her somewhere prominent, only for her to disappear again.

  One day, when I’m picking you up from nursery, the carer tells me you got very upset in the toddler room.

  I ask what the problem was.

  You were upset because the only doll left to play with was a brown one. You wanted to play with the peach one. When you were told that the brown one was the only one you could play with, you cried and cried and had to be calmed down. When I arrived, you were being coddled by the carer, too sad to play with your friends.

  ‘I don’t want to play with the brown one. Brown is dirty,’ you told the nursery worker.

  Brown is dirty.

  Suddenly brown is not the colour of a felt tip pen you don’t want to use to colour in a unicorn. Brown isn’t the hue of a dress you don’t want to wear because the pink one is much prettier. Suddenly, brown is dirty.

  I didn’t really acknowledge I was a different skin colour to other people till I went to school and three kids would lick their wrists in the playground and pretend they tasted of milkshake. Whereas I, their theory went, must taste like shit.

  I remember that shame only too well.

  I remember the conflation of shit and curry only too well. Brown curry, brown poo, brown skin.

  I remember having to change out of my school uniform the second I got home from school, into home clothes, a simple white jubo lengha, because the last thing my mum wanted was for my clothes to smell of her cooking.

  ‘The white boys will make fun of you,’ she told me. ‘Don’t give them that opportunity.’

  Which I know now is laughable. Because as we all know, curry smells delicious.

  I don’t raise the issue with you immediately. I’m trying to work out the best way to talk to you about it. To let you know that you are brown. Are you dirty? Is brown dirty or has society simply filed it as such? It needs to be done as respectfully as possible without causing you a complex. A few evenings later, we’re reading a book together. Mumbi, the doll a friend brought back from Sri Lanka, sits in my lap next to you. You pick Mumbi up and throw her to the floor.

  I pick Mumbi back up and cuddle her and kiss her on the cheek, pretending she is upset and needs comforting.

  ‘That wasn’t very nice, throwing her to the floor,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t want her,’ you reply, tapping the book we’re reading, as if to say, can we get back to this please?

  ‘Why don’t you want her?’ I ask. ‘Do you not like her?’

  ‘I do like her,’ you say. ‘I do. She has a nice smile and she has pretty black hair.’

  ‘And gorgeous brown skin,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t want to be brown,’ you say, and look at me. You’re trying to work something out, and I don’t know how to help you through it. ‘I want to be like Mummy.’

  ‘You are brown. And that’s a good thing,’ I tell you, before returning to the book.

  ‘Okay,’ you sigh, with the air of a teenager whose embarrassing dad has just told them he will drive them to the school dance.

  We carry on reading. Your resignation is heavy in my chest. Almost like your wanting to be more like your mum carries with it an implicit rejection of me.

  When I share the story with friends later, they tell me I’m obsessing over race and colour and I’m contributing to making things more difficult for you.

  One of them tells me that I am trying to control the narrative, while the other says kids have their own narrative, regardless of adult views and it’s my job to provide a loving environment for you. I am, she says, raising them in the world I’ve grown up in, rather than letting them discover their own world for themselves . . .

  This hits me hard. Like I’m in the process of radicalizing you. Like we’re at the entry level of my brown revolutionary trai
ning camp (motto: let’s go to brown town; uniform: saris and kurtas; menu: mango with everything). There is a burden on parents of mixed-race children to give you the full picture, not shy away from, or ignore, parts of your cultural heritage. And love you no matter what. Listening to my friends tell me off for obsessing about your race and making you anxious about it as well makes me furious. These dappled snapshots of parental conversations, where you think you’re doing it the right way, where no one else raises kids like you, like if we all just followed your advice . . . it’s why I tend to avoid talking about these deeper issues. Why I stick to poop stories. And pretend I dislike my kids for comedic effect. Because to interrogate these real things is to open yourself up to criticism for something so innate and personal, about the very core of your identity.

  We are in this world and the times we live in make it utterly incumbent on me to prepare you, Ganga. That’s why we have these conversations. We’re not ready for the utopia of which my friend speaks. The irony, that she is a white woman raising a brown baby, is not lost on me.

  Scaachi Koul wrote in her memoir, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, of her mixed-race niece that ‘We struggled towards whiteness, and soon she will have to develop her own definitions for the complexity of being two things at once. I want to stamp brownness on her, but in a way that protects her rather than exposes her. I can’t have it both ways.’

  To tell you that brown isn’t dirty, that’s all I want to do. To ensure that you do not self-other, that you never look at brown people and see them as separate or different to you. That you do not sit in a room filled with cousins and kakas and kakis and bapujis and nanis and fais and fuvas chatting away in Gujarati and find it bewildering and alien. That you look at brown skin and see beauty, power, grace, love, cleanliness, success, brilliance, normality. That you do not perpetuate associations and stereotypes that exist from the second we’re born.

  I want to protect you from the default of whiteness in this country. The default that manifests in chuckling white babies in books and on nappy packets and in adverts. The default that led Darren Chetty to write in his essay in The Good Immigrant about how a school kid once told him that ‘stories have to be about white people’. Scaachi is right. I can’t have it both ways. I can’t have you feeling exposed, drowned in whiteness, expected to conform. Your skin will glow and resonate and be who you are. You are happy in your skin, whatever it is. And there is a whole side of you that feels as complete as the default setting you are born into in England.

  My mum once told my sister to not even sit in the sun. If she got too dark, no one would marry her. It was the standard opinion in my family. That dark was bad and fair was perfection. The amount of times my sister would comment on how dark my knuckles were and how I needed to be careful the rest of me didn’t catch up. It wasn’t just beauty standards that rejected darkness. Power could be undone by the tone of your skin. A friend of mine, now a management consultant, dropped me off at home one day, in his ridiculous new car that I would talk about in more detail if I actually gave a shit about cars (it was black?); Mum said of him: ‘all that money is wasted on him. He’s so dark no one will marry him.’ Marriage is the goal. Skin tone the fast-track.

  I think if I’d had the guts to unpick my mum’s ‘casual’ colourism when she was alive, it wouldn’t have stood up to any scrutiny other than it’s a feeling she grew up with and absorbed rather than actively thought. But I let it go.

  It’s an interesting counterpoint to the idea of the exotic in the UK, which posits a mysterious love interest as ‘tall, dark and handsome’. It’s an abstraction. It doesn’t mean anything and holds no weight. It supposes that the short white man is default and the mysterious potential of something new is tall, it is dark, and it is handsome. It doesn’t mean anything other than casual exotification of skin tone.

  In our family, I was puzzled by the idea of fairness, lightness, whiteness, as a beauty standard. As I said, it bothered me that Bollywood heroes are often fair skinned and the villain is dark skinned, and this seemed to seep into our familial interactions. Shah Rukh Khan, one of Bollywood’s most enduring and popular actors over the last twenty years, has come under fire in recent years for being a spokesperson for Fair And Handsome (Fair And Lovely skin-bleaching cream, but for men – counter to the tall, dark and handsome vibe). In an interview with the Guardian, Khan has said that he doesn’t use the cream himself and doesn’t believe in the idea of selling beauty. Both of these unconvincing defences of the product and his endorsement call into question quite why he’s being paid to endorse a product he neither uses nor believes in, on a conceptual level.

  Money is a hell of a drug, I guess. Almost as addictive as the proximity to whiteness.

  His endorsement is careless. Because a paycheque for him is a livelihood for people who spend millions of rupees on these creams, an industry for those who make it. His endorsement is careless because it ratifies colonial beauty standards using Bollywood star power. His endorsement is careless because his influence will cause people across the world to look at themselves in the mirror and see imperfections in the tone of their skin. They will develop afflictions. The way they view themselves is warped. They are changing the colour of their skin, to be closer to whiteness. They. Are. Putting. Bleach. On. Their. Skin. To. Make. Themselves. White.

  Why do they want to be whiter? What does that proximity offer? Is it an embrace into a branch of elitism that their skin colour alone won’t give them? Are they perpetuating racism and white supremacy against themselves?

  It bears repeating.

  They are changing the colour of their skin, to be closer to whiteness. They. Are. Putting. Bleach. On. Their. Skin. To. Make. Themselves. White.

  And Shah Rukh is banking a cheque to encourage them to do so.

  And now, Ganga, you think brown is dirty and my mum made us wear high-factor suncream. And when I was a teenager, friends of mine used foundation on their faces that was purposefully lighter than their skin colour to make them look whiter when we went out. And to you, brown is dirty. Brown is poo. And rubbish. Brown is not the colour of chocolate or caramel or beauty or perfection. Brown is not the colour of curry or wholemeal toast or homes or our skins that we live in.

  In the film Chameleon Street there’s a conversation between two men on darkness.

  ‘I like girls with that light complexion look,’ one friend says to another.

  His friend is incredulous. ‘You’re a moron,’ he retorts.

  ‘Man I can’t help it,’ the man says defensively. ‘I’m a victim.’

  It sounds like an excuse, and his friend presses him on it.

  ‘You’re a victim?’

  ‘Yeah! I’m a victim of four hundred years of conditioning. The man has programmed my conditioning. Even my conditioning has been conditioned.’

  Colonialism, Ganga. But this conditioning we’ve been subjected to. It’s time to break the cycle.

  As for those three boys, they used to run circles around the few South Asians in our school, sucking their fingers and laughing, comparing themselves to milkshakes. Vanilla milkshake. They all laughed and laughed and laughed at us. We were low down in the pecking order of the school. None of us spoke up. We stood there, in the circle, as those around us watched this ritualistic sizing down take place day after day.

  I sucked my fingers.

  ‘You’re sucking shit,’ one of them called. ‘Shit fingers. Shit skin.’

  ‘No,’ I shouted back, frustrated, my voice erupting like a bubbling up of shaken fizzy drink. ‘It’s milkshake. Chocolate milkshake. Mmmm,’ I cooed unconvincingly.

  Even I didn’t believe my gambit.

  ‘Shit-skin, shit-skin,’ they all laughed and called out in chorus.

  I looked at my two friends. One of them was staring at the clouds, probably imagining himself flying away. He was a Superman fan. The other was impotently shouting, ‘No, no, not . . .’

  Shit-skin.

  ‘You
smell,’ one of them said as they got bored and walked away. ‘Like shit.’

  My skin was shit. I stared at the grass, wishing it would grow over me and hide me. I wanted to take an eraser and rub myself out from existence. My skin was shit. But I could change the way I smelled. I begged my mum to let me buy deodorant. I was too young, she told me. Also deodorant was expensive.

  I told my cousin what had happened and he handed me his half-empty can of Brut, telling me not to tell my mum.

  Years later, I watch White Right: Meeting the Enemy, a documentary presented by the incomparable filmmaker Deeyah Khan. After enduring racist abuse following a BBC news interview with journalist Catrin Nye about rising Islamaphobia, she decides to spend some time with white supremacists in America and try to understand where their hate comes from. But also, to try to get them to see her as a human being. She follows three or four subjects around, non-judgementally, on their daily lives spreading hate in America. She is friendly and personable and asks them difficult follow-up questions if they make a generalization that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. She follows one as he distributes hate literature in different parts of his home town, spends time with another in his daily routine, even goes on a march with them all. The march is interrupted by counter-protestors and Deeyah is caught in the chaos of something approaching a riot.

  And then, just when their guards are down and they see her as a confidante, a friend, a person who understands them, their frustrations, the way they feel the world has let them down, and their hatred towards people with a different skin colour, she asks if they would now deport her, in the same way they want all the other Muslims and brown people deported. Each one stumbles, utterly wrong-footed by the fact that, now, she is a ‘friend’ of theirs. She then reads out to them the abuse she received, from tweets to slurs. And they are all confronted with what it’s like to be racially abused en masse. In chorus. To be in a circle as people around you call you names that strip away your identity.