“The ad simply reinforces the idea that you’ve got to be fair to be anything in life,” says Kiran. “It says that if you’re fair and good looking, you’ll be a wonderful daughter-in-law or husband, your skin colour determines how successful you’ll be in life. The ad reinforces age-old prejudices.” - BBC

Reading this article remind me, this isn’t only happening in india, I’ll bet it happened in every asians countries that has a mixed of skin color, where being dark(er) is undesirable and you won’t go by a day without seeing commercials for skin whitening product.

I know first hand about being dark in the white-worshipped country. It’s nothing like a racism problem in America. No, I didn’t get discriminated by school, didn’t get beaten up by the lighter-skinned folks, didn’t get labeled as a criminal (mostly). But what happened here is subtler form of racism, which nobody would ever admit that it is a racism at all. if you have dark(er) skins, you will most likely be perceived as ugly, couple the dark(er) skin with flat nose and big nostrils, and you will get the ugliest ones in the crowd, (I fit that description). If you looked like this, people will usually perceive you as being poor (they are right) uneducated (mostly right), dumb (I’d like to think that I’m not dumb), you will also get ridiculed as being ‘Lao’, which refer to Laotian, but also a derogatory term meaning anything from unfashionable, uncivilized, uncultured, to downright dimwit. Funny thing is this derogatory term is sometimes used amount friends in friendly manner and you are not supposed to get angry.

even if they mean it.

I haven’t thought of all these for ages, simply because I got out of the hell that called highschool and I have no reason to care what other people think of me, I have no social circle besides friends that don’t mind how I looked and never really have those problem above, I doubt I will ever be perceived as beautiful, and frankly, I don’t care. But it sadden me that this prejudice will never go away, simply because it was never addressed and admitted.

“Deep within this 5,000-year-old culture is the thought that high ideals, nobility and high caste are associated with fair skin,” she says. “Dark skin is regarded as low status and low caste.”