From: udcrusd@meaddata.com (Sylvia D'Cruz)
Subject: Fair and lovely: Remember that face cream ?
Keywords: color skin
 
Organization: Mead Data Central, Dayton OH
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 18:31:43 GMT
Distribution: soc.culture.indian

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                   Copyright 1992 Newspaper Publishing PLC
                                The Independent

                             August  2, 1992, Sunday

Notebook: Michael Jackson: beyond the pale

By FIAMMETTA ROCCO

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    WHEN casting started recently on The Jacksons: An American Dream, word
quickly got around among the producers of the upcoming mini-series that the
singer had discovered the perfect actor to play him aged five. But when the kid
turned up to audition, he turned out to be white.

    So Michael Jackson wants to be seen as a white boy. The story may be
apocryphal, but is widely believed. That's not surprising. We're told he has
already had his nose narrowed, his hair straightened, his skin lightened. He
never goes out in the sun. So why shouldn't he be a white boy if he longs to
that much? The world's a big place, with room for all sorts. Marilyn became
blonde. And Dukakis, as far as anyone knows, still wears stacked heels. As
Suzanne Moore wrote in the Guardian last week, ''the only thing Michael Jackson
can be accused of is wanting to be someone else. Is that so wrong?''

    America's most famous black man is on a two-month European tour to promote
his latest album, Dangerous. Since he arrived in London last Wednesday, he has
staged three Wembley concerts, visited a hospital, handed pounds 200,000 to the
Prince's Trust, and danced an impromptu pirouette to stop a deranged fan
throwing himself off the top of a six-storey building.

    But not everyone is cheering. ''It must register on his fans,'' says Stuart
Hall, Professor of Sociology at the Open University and a well-known commentator
on black issues, ''that what Michael Jackson is doing is a repudiation of being
black.''

    SUCH self-repudiation was given ''scientific'' credence at the end of the
19th century. Along with gripe water and the Great Railway Timetable, the
Victorians also bequeathed us anthropometry, the systematic measurement of human
dimensions. Early studies of evolution led them to develop a whole range of
theories associating biological race with cultural and intellectual
development. Anthropometric research would substantiate these ideas.

    The Victorians were particularly fascinated by the Indian caste system,
which divided Hindu society into four groups, or varnas. The highest of these
are pale-coloured and fine-featured, the lowest are dark. High-caste Indians
whisper that the low-born have irregular, coarse and fleshy faces. And the very
word caste comes from the Portuguese for ''pure stock''. It is linked,
etymologically, to the Latin for ''chaste''.

    Sir Herbert Hope Risley, director of ethnography in the Indian Civil Service
spent most of his life measuring the noses of thousands of people in northern
India. His obsession produced Risley's Orbito-Nasal Index. With his calipers,
Risley found (at least to his satisfaction) that people from higher castes had
narrower, sharper noses than those from lower castes. Risley's life's work, The
People of India, made one conclusion when it was published in 1908; ''a man's
social status varies in inverse ratio to the width of his nose''.

    Has Michael Jackson read Risley? Almost certainly not. Neither have the
young men and women who advertise for marriage partners every Sunday in the
Hindustan Times. One after the other, the small ads call for spouses, with
''wheat-coloured complexion and sharp features''. Even a Green Card isn't as
important as a fair skin.

    The fear of being associated with a dark race led Merle Oberon, even before
she went to Hollywood, to hide her beginnings. Dark-eyed and exotic, she
insisted to her public that she was born in Tasmania. In private she tried to
lighten her skin with fierce cosmetics that did nothing but ruin her complexion.
All to hide the truth, which her biographer discovered quite by chance after her
death, that she was an Anglo- Indian born in  Bombay.

    Black is Beautiful was meant to do away with all of that. The slogan was
coined in 1966 by Stokely Carmichael, the guru of the black power movement, and
taken up the following year by Martin Luther King. What would he have made of
Michael Jackson? Would he have said the singer was betraying Black is Beautiful?

    HE WOULD have a good reason to. The US entertainment business may not be as
negrophobic as it was in Ms Oberon's day, but it still wants its stars to be
white, or failing that, pale. The same, often, goes for politics, so much of
which is performed on television. Alice Walker, the black American writer best
known for her novel, The Colour Purple, reserves her deepest scorn for America's
black political leaders, who have all, she says, with the exception of Malcolm
X, married women distinctly less black than themselves. She castigates American
blacks for spitting ''in our black mother's face''.

    ''The black black woman,'' she wrote in an essay in 1982, ''is our essential
mother - the blacker she is the more us she is - and to see the hatred that is
turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a
people.''

    America is far from the only country to prize whiteness above black. When
Jimmy Carter appointed America's first black ambassador, it was to Tanzania.
President Nyerere nearly refused his credentials, reportedly because he wanted a
white ambassador ''like everyone else got'', an aide said.

    Today in Nairobi, a well-known plastic surgeon narrows the nostrils of at
least one wealthy African every month. Two or three times a week he is called
upon to reduce lip sizes. ''Clients bring me pictures of Michael Jackson and
say, 'Can you make me look like that?' '' The longing is unreserved. His clients
are equally divided between men and women.

    If Africans bring him photographs, so do black people in east London when
they visit Norma Vidler, a beauty therapist best known for her work repairing
the damage done by cosmetic creams that promise to lighten skin.

    The active ingredient in these creams is an industrial bleach called
hydroquinone used extensively in photographic processing. In the UK, it is
illegal to sell creams that contain more than 2 per cent of hydroquinone, but
many products are imported illegally, mostly from West Africa.

    Most of these display no labelling, and those that do use code words. Their
purpose is to ''treat freckles and age spots''. They promise ''clear, even-
toned skin''. The truth, says Ms Vidler, is that ''hydroquinone destroys the
skin cells. It destroys the pigment. It makes the skin very rough and
orange-peely, and can cause huge bumps.'' She recently saw one case where even
the lightest peeling treatment caused the skin to come away in huge chunks.
''The effect is devastating. But people still use it.'' Why?

    ''So many say they are Michael Jackson fans,'' she says. ''They use these
creams to make themselves look more like him. But I've seen the results. And I
think he's done a great disservice to his race.''

    It is a view Professor Hall shares. ''Ever since Black is Beautiful, looks,
colour, hair - all the things that make up race - have become highly
politicised.  For many black kids their bodies are the only cultural capital
they have. You see black kids in the street. You don't know where they come from
or if they have a job. So their street style, their clothes, their hair, is of
paramount importance. It's so trendy to be black. Among some kids it's the
trendiest thing going.''

    Last night, Michael Jackson played at Wembley. Most of his fans were white.
The trendy black kids stayed away. His music is neither soul nor rap. It's pop,
they say. It's white.

    Earlier this year he went to Africa. In the Ivory Coast they made him an
honorary tribal king. That was the only good thing that happened. When Mr
Jackson got off the plane in Abidjan, he held a handkerchief over his nose. In
Tanzania, his next stop, he raced past the waiting foreign minister, and fled
into his air-conditioned car. His black fans turned on him. Their welcome had
been spurned, they said; their blackness insulted. The newspapers attacked his
nose job, his hankering to be paler.

    ''This mutant genius, this voluntary mutant, this recreated being, bleached,
neither black nor white, neither man nor woman, so delicate, so frail . . .''
sputtered the newspaper Ivoir'soir. He cut short his trip and flew back to white
America.