Beauty: A Brown Guy's Observations in Black and White

In Istanbul, I was at an event organised through a travellers' network. I was talking to a Turk and a German (yes, sometimes they can stand each other!). I noticed a black person at the event. In the previous four months of travelling, I had not come across any black traveller. I immediately excused myself from the conversation that I was having and went to introduce myself to the black person- a girl from Nigeria. Let's call her M. We grabbed a drink each and got talking. She was pursuing higher education in Istanbul. After the customary introductory conversation, I invited her to the dance floor. Actually she brought up dancing by making fun of Bollywood movies. She wanted me to dance Bollywood to jaded international music! I tried. Pitiably.

We were having fun. Just then somebody pushed her from behind. There was a group of Turks. I am not sure whether it was inadvertent or intentional. But she wanted to get off the dance floor. She was visibly disturbed. We sat at a table nearby. We were two and the table was for a larger group. Another group of Turks entered the bar and sat at the same table. The floor was quite small and overcrowded. But my friend felt offended. I wanted to make sure that she was all right. I asked her what happened. I could sense that it was not about the Turks shoving and grabbing the seats. It went much deeper. Upon much insistence, she eventually told me how secluded she felt in Istanbul because of the colour of her skin. "Turkish women think they are the most beautiful in the world. I am beautiful too. I do have nice features. So what if I am black?" She said a lot more. But, after a point, her serrated words felt like a stab after stab after stab. I could not bear the pain that she wanted to share, and, to this day, whenever I think about my conversation with M, my eyes turn moist. I really want to relay her pain to all of you. But I don't know how. In that moment, however, I wanted her to stop. I wanted to reach out to her, hug her, and apologise to her on behalf of the rest of humanity.

"Why should anybody have to feel like that," I thought to myself.

The correlation between beauty and skin colour had come up earlier in a few conversations. The first one was somewhere in Romania with an Austrian, a Romanian and two Germans-all of them in their 20s. We were discussing women of which country or region are the most beautiful. The Austrian's verdict- Scandinavian. I contested, "Scandinavian are too white. I'd say Balkan, Mediterranean, or Middle Eastern, even Turkish." The older German guy facepalmed at the mention of Turkish women. The Austrian reiterated that the Scandinavian are the most beautiful in a tone that I did not appreciate. I said something to warn him that he was almost sounding racist. At that point, the younger German tried to pacify the rising tempers by sharing his honest perspective, "I should be able to see the girl in a dark room. That's where I draw the line."

Later, somewhere in Montenegro, I became friends with a group of German travellers. Even though I was the only one who could not fluently speak German, we conversed mostly in English. Three of the Germans had been travelling for a month and had spent too much time in the sun. The hands of one of them had become pale yellow. He remarked, looking at his hands with a bit of disgust, "Oh man I cannot wait to get back home! Look at my hands!"

In another conversation in a different country, this time with a French and a German (While travelling in Europe it may seem like the Germans have surpassed the Chinese in number; they are everywhere!), I was sharing the story of a Norwegian friend- a girl travelling solo in India and finding a second home in a remote village in north-east India. The German wanted to travel to India and had asked me about safety in India. It was in that connection that I was sharing the story of the brave Norwegian girl I was lucky to meet during my travels. One of the details is that she got off from a bus in that remote village and almost immediately a few villagers gathered around her wondering what she was doing there. I commented, "They had most probably never seen a white person before." The German guy blurted out, almost wanting to withdraw what he had said, "They must have thought, 'Wow, who is this angel!'" (I would have liked to share my Norwegian friend's story here because it is quite interesting and funny, but it's not related.)

In northern Mexico, a white Mexican guy asked me if the women in India were too short like the Mexicanas. He also commented how women of Sinaloa and Jalisco (states in Mexico) are the most beautiful in Mexico. I asked him why. He replied, "They have white skin, blond hair and light-coloured eyes." The girls in his state, Chihuahua, are light brown and typically not doe-eyed. Somebody, somewhere else in Mexico, had commented that the women from Oaxaca and Chiapas (two states in southern Mexico) are not the best.

Which country has the most beautiful women people, and implicitly, what is the definition of beauty, is a theme that keeps coming up in conversations with other travellers-both male and female. There seems to be a universal agreement that white is the most beautiful. Most white women are afraid of travelling solo through brown or black populations.

But we all know that. So what is my point?

I am not sure. I think when I was at home, I could see the media projecting white as beautiful all the time. So I knew the world considers white to be more beautiful. But I was nonchalant about it because it did not jeopardise me in any way. However, after I started travelling, to confront actual individuals, who were nice to me otherwise, but considered themselves or their ilk to be more beautiful because of the colour of their skin made me feel mad. Yet, I did not really confront the Austrian, the Germans and the white Mexican. I ignored them.

But after my conversation with M, I was forced to think about all of this and not continue to live like a zombie without questioning what is wrong with considering white to be beautiful and by implication superior.

I could not bear the pain and said goodbye to M. While walking back from Takşim to my hostel in Sultanahmet, I contemplated over the genesis of our common perception of beauty. I am sure there are others who must have thought about it before: I think our neurons have become wired to believe in a unidimensional definition of beauty. Now, I am no brain scientist but could it be traced back to our fear of the dark in ancient times? As human beings we must have been afraid of the dark before we learned to make fire. Perhaps, therefore, most cultures associate dark with evil and white with something, as the German traveller said, “angelic.” Gods of many Native American tribes were white. Indian Hindu deities are mostly white. In several ancient cultures nightfall meant a demon swallowed the sun. Therefore, anything lighter than dark must have been preferable, even when it came to skin colour. When people of different skin colours interacted with each other for the first time, not surprisingly, the darker ones were considered inferior or associated with evil. When invaders or settlers from Central Asia and Europe arrived in India, the natives were made to believe that they were less beautiful. Some people argue that in the Indian Hindu epic Ramayana, the people portrayed as demons were in fact the darker natives of India. Or, when the darker-skinned gypsies or Roma people arrived in Europe in the 11th century, perhaps because of the fear of everything dark, they were associated with evil. In Easter Europe, to this day, parents use threats, such as "...or else the gypsies will kidnap you," in order to get their kids to agree with them.

In fact, I was confused to be a gypsy in Romania by an old man who kept hurling racial slurs at me while I was waiting for a bus in Brašov. The racists in Northern or Western Europe would probably do the same to a Romanian. Racist Turks treated M just the way racist Germans treat the Turks. It's a funny world we live in. 

But I digress. Going back to neurons: if our neurons are wired to perceive white as beautiful and “angelic,” perhaps we can make our neurons shed this perception that has been passed on for generations and reinforced during the subjugation of darker skinned peoples in different parts of the world. The brain is, after all, only a muscle; it can be trained.

I hope that by the end of my travels, beauty, for me, will not be skin deep. And colour will be what it is- merely the light rays reflected by a surface because it absorbs the rest of the spectrum.

M. also said that she liked the way Germans treated her. She wanted to move to Germany. I hope she is a happier person now.