Skin Bleaching in Black Atlantic Zones

Shade Shifters

S. Tate

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137498441
• eBook ISBN: 9781137498465
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This book's discussion of skin bleaching, lightening and toning in Black Atlantic zones disengages with the usual tropes of Black Nationalism and global white supremacy such as 'the desire to be white', 'low self-esteem' and 'self-hatred' and instead engages with the global multi-billion dollar market in lighter skins with products from local cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurs. This practice can be for short-term strategic purposes and the production of bleached lightness and new subjectivities through skin shades across Black Atlantic zones - the UK, USA, Caribbean, Latin America and the Africa continent- is also a simultaneous critique of continuing pigmentocracy and darker skin disadvantage. This book seeks to decolonize skin bleaching, lightening and toning by exploring its racialized gender political and libidinal economies in the Black Atlantic. In so doing it moves past the notion that global white supremacy dynamizes the practice to a position where the interaction of colourism and 'post-race' neo-liberal racialization aesthetics becomes the focus.

1

A Brief Black/White/Light History of Skin Bleaching/Lightening/Toning

Abstract: This chapter destabilizes the Manicheanism of iconic whiteness and authentic Blackness in skin bleaching’s racialized gender, political and libidinal economies. The discussion begins with ‘white face’ in Europe, the Caribbean colonies and the United States before looking at the complex meanings of the practice among Black women in different Black Atlantic sites, which takes us beyond the usual tropes of ‘self-hate’ and ‘low self-esteem’. The chapter thinks through ‘post-race’ skin bleaching within the ‘third space skins’ of Dencia and Mshoza. Neither of these women want to be white but to embody a lightness that is not antithetical to Blackness and a part of it. Third space skins emerge in the interstices of white supremacy and Black nationalism, as women embrace artifice through ‘post-race’, self-affirming, aesthetic enhancement and choice.

Tate, Shirley Anne. Skin Bleaching in Black Atlantic Zones: Shade Shifters. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137498465.0004.

Within the Black Atlantic, skin bleaching/lightening/toning occupies a negative social, political, cultural and affective space because of its imbrication with white supremacy, colonialism and Blackness constructed as lack/failure/pathology. The ‘social and organic’ Black ‘libidinal skin’ as ‘the surface crossed and the crossing’ (Lyotard, 1993:16) is marked by the memory of the intensity of its past devaluation by white supremacy, much as it is by what remains as (post)colonialism or ‘post-race’ colourism and its phobia of darker skin. The Black ‘libidinal skin’ is also marked by its value within Black Nationalism as something vulnerable which should remain in its natural state. Here darker skin is most prized because of its philic connections to the African continent and the Black Atlantic diaspora. Black skin records its past and present value/negation in that ‘region of transmutation from one skin into a different skin’ (Lyotard, 1993:20), represented by skin bleaching/ lightening/ toning. Here libidinal economies of bleaching/lightening/toning as a sign of self-hate, low self-esteem and desire to be white produced by white supremacy and Black Nationalism overdetermine the Black ‘producer-body’ (Lyotard, 1993:16) as negative. However, libidinal economies of skin transmutation within the Black Atlantic can also be seen as racially positive, as philic rather than phobic. First, bleaching/lightening/toning can be read as oppositional to white supremacy and colourism, and second, as ‘post-race’, self-affirming aesthetic enhancement and choice, which has nothing to do with a desire to be white or whiteness as an aesthetic ideal. These racially positive positions enable critique of lightness, which is the colour line of 21st century neo-liberal racialization, in which societal phobia of darker skin is obscured. The libidinal economy of Black skin operates in tandem with the political economy of racism and can be positive, in terms of attraction, alliance and affection, or negative because of aggression, phobia and violent consumption as

libidinal economy functions variously across scales and is as ‘objective’ as political economy. It is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction and the violence of lethal consumption [ ... ] it is the whole structure of psychic and emotional life [ ... ] something more than but inclusive of or traversed by [ ... ] a ‘structure of feeling’; it is a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, phobias capable of great mobility and tenacious fixation. (Wilderson, 2010:7)

This chapter unpicks the racialized gender political and libidinal economies of skin bleaching/lightening/toning as racially performative for Black, white and Black-white ‘mixed-race’ women in a number of sites and historical periods. First, let us look at Black skin’s political and libidinal economies.

Black skin’s political and libidinal economies

In our racialized anatomical economy, Black skin is under panoptical surveillance and catches the eye. There is a tenacious fixation on Black skin bleaching/lightening/toning as a problem requiring either nation-state policy intervention or Black Nationalist political solution. It is Black skin bleaching/lightening/toning which produces those negative emotional sensations through which its ugly affects are narrativized. Black skin as vulnerable and in need of protection exists within neo-liberal racialization’s libidinal economies in ‘post-race’ states such as the UK, the United States, Jamaica, South Africa and Brazil. The argument about the US and UK as ‘post-race’ states is an ongoing one. Suffice it to say that Jamaica became ‘post-race’ on independence from the British Empire in 1962, as did South Africa with the end of apartheid in 1994, while Brazil has always maintained its status as a racial democracy. However, racism and colourism are rampant in these states, as we have seen in 2015, for example, with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign in the United States and the student movement, ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, at Rhodes University in South Africa.

Black skin might be vulnerable, but skin bleaching/lightening/toning is a global issue, and in 2014, about 15% of the world’s population bought skin lighteners. By 2018, sales are projected to reach US 19.8 billion dollars (www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/fashion/why-are-women-still-dying-to-be-white/1.1705800#.vsutqfnF-so, accessed 13 April 2015). Japan is the largest market worldwide: consumers, especially older women, spend more than women elsewhere on bihaku products. Globally, pills, potions, creams, soaps, lotions, suppositories, laser treatments, intravenous drips and injections are all part of the arsenal for beautiful skin which goes unremarked in the battle for enhancement. Skin bleaching/lightening/toning is invisible until the beauty regime switches to speaking instead of hydroquinone, mercury, corticosteroids, Glutathione and Black skin. Then we see that beautification and its market in products, brands and technologies already transport racial signification. We also see that skin and what we do with it is highly political individually, because racial allegiances, self-esteem and identities are called into question. This is amplified for Black women through the prevalent discourse of a yearning for lightness/whiteness because of the impact of the global white aesthetic, economic, political, epistemological, technological and cultural supremacy (Hunter, 2011; Blay, 2009; Glenn, 2009; Lewis et al 2011; Hall, 2006; Pierre, 2013; Blay, 2009; Charles, 2003, 2009a; del Guidice and Yves, 2002; Fokuo, 2009; Al-Saleh et al, 2002).

The discussion in this book aims to critique and analyze skin bleaching/lightening/toning within the neo-liberal political economy of racism and the racialized gender anatomical and libidinal economies of Black diaspora identifications. This will enable a movement away from the discourse of Black pathology and a desire for whiteness as a particular Black psychic, skin and consumption orientation which implicates white supremacy’s hold on Black psyche, identification and behaviour. Rather, what will be highlighted are the complexities which exist within the practices of skin bleaching/lightening/toning in a variety of Black Atlantic zones.

Globally, non-white skin is problematized as we see in the WHO (World Health Organization) report (2012) on mercury and skin lightening. According to the report, mercury is a common ingredient found in skin lightening soaps and creams and other cosmetics, such as eye makeup cleansing products and mascara. In some Black Atlantic states, skin bleaching/lightening/toning is reproduced in national public health discourses as an issue for public policy intervention, as states take action to protect their citizens from the health risks carried by the bleaching/lightening/toning agents, hydroquinone, mercury and corticosteroids. Skin lightening soaps and creams are commonly used in some African and Asian nations and among dark-skinned people in Europe and North America (ibid.). In Mali (25%), Nigeria (77%), Senegal (27%), South Africa (35%) and Togo (59%), women regularly use skin lighteners (ibid.). Forty percent of women surveyed in 2004 in China (Province of Taiwan and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region), Malaysia, the Philippines and the Republic of Korea used skin lighteners. In India, 61% of the dermatological market is skin-lightening products (ibid.).

The manufacture of skin lightening products, their marketing, consumption and surveillance is also a global enterprise (Mire, 2001; Glenn, 2008). Consumer protection agencies in the European Union and the United States found that mercury-containing products were manufactured in China, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and the United States (ibid.). The Internet is also the global marketplace for mercury-containing lightening products for the face, body, vagina and anus. A 2011 survey funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety found that people from Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico and the Russian Federation thought that mercury-containing skin lightening products were easily obtainable. As a result of consumer pressure, some manufacturers no longer use mercury as a preservative in mascara and eye makeup cleansing products. The sale of makeup products containing mercury compounds is still allowed around the globe, with controls over the amount used being the only restriction on its use (ibid.).

In 2011, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advised that skin lightening creams should contain no more than a trace of mercury as part of the unavoidable impurities produced through manufacture (Hall, 2006). On 29 August 2006, the FDA ruled that another notorious and long-existing skin lightener, hydroquinone, should not exceed 1.5–2.0% of an active ingredient in over-the-counter (OTC) skin bleaching drugstore products (Hall, 2006). Since January 2001, the EU has prohibited the use of hydroquinone in cosmetics. Alternatives – for example, retinoids, azelaic acid, kojic acid, aleosin, ascorbic acid – have been proposed as replacements for hydroquinone in cosmetics, but their safety and effectiveness have yet to be carefully studied (Hall, 2006). Jamaica launched its anti-skin bleaching campaign, ‘Don’t kill the skin’, in 2007, and since then, controlling the circulation of bleaching products and public education has been a government concern. The public health campaign did not acknowledge the social and political implications of light skin in Jamaica and had very little effect, as it was based solely on changing people’s attitudes (Hope, 2009; Hunter 2011; Charles, 2009b; Brown-Glaude, 2007). Ghana’s campaign ‘Love your natural skin tone – say no to skin bleaching and toning’ began in July 2014 and was again based on changing attitudes, rather than looking at what structural and economic issues drive bleaching. In South Africa, skin bleaching is debated as much as it is an integral part of everyday life in a society enthralled by ‘yellow bone’, lighter skin as we can see from the Internet presence of skin bleaching businesses and clinics in South Africa.

We can also see everyday UK skin bleaching as unmarked trans-racial practice aimed at all women, if we go to a popular, low-cost brand retailer in the UK, where they stocked Langé Paris Créme de Nuit Éclaircissante (lightening night cream) which promises intense lightening, and its companion product, Correcteur de Táches (dark spot corrector). The Langé Paris site also carries Intensive Lightening Lotion and Intensive Lightening Mask and Day Cream. Langé Paris was set up in 2005, with its cosmetics based on natural products produced ‘in the French cosmetic valley’. The packaging, the store, and the website do not mention that this product is for Black consumers, but in the UK, a discursive attachment continues between the Black woman’s body and problematized bleaching in the medical profession, local authority trading standards services and the media.

Such attachment reproduces skin bleaching as a site of racialized disgust, contempt, guilt and shame on the part of Black individuals and communities alongside white racialized disgust, contempt and shaming of Black bleachers. This libidinal economy of Black skin bleaching, based on the discourse of the internalization of white supremacy, is a particular rendition of skin lightening as Black pathology. To reiterate, this ignores the fact that the practice is enabled by a multi-billion dollar global pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry, some of which is based in Europe and the United States, and that bleaching is transracial and transnational in scope (Mire, 2001). Furthermore, it ignores the fact that white bodies are also bleached/lightened/toned and, most importantly, that the aim of Black people who engage in skin bleaching/lightening/toning is decidedly not to be white (Tate, 2015a,b; 2010; 2009). Such desire is constituted by the rejection of what is normatively less attractive: that is, white skin. Black skin bleaching/lightening/toning disengages with the usual trope of desire to be white, whilst revealing subjects’ desire for self-fashioning as lighter but Black through the use of stylization technologies. Further, bleachers’ disengagement with the desire to be white illustrates that this practice can be for short-term strategic purposes to produce new subjectivities through skin shade transformation across Black Atlantic zones – the UK, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the African continent.

Subjectivity mobility is brought into being on the surface of body through an activity vilified as dangerous, or at least risky for the health of Black skin and for the individual if it is achieved through under-the-counter (UTC) bleaching products. This vilification is not meted out to other aesthetic procedures such as micro-dermabrasion, peeling, face-lifts, botox, snake venom, lip enlargements, cheek implants, and other aesthetic industry-approved enhancement procedures, products and objects. Skin bleaching/lightening/toning, performed under medical supervision in clinics around the world, similarly is not seen as dangerous. Racialized as Black, skin bleaching/lightening/toning/ is constructed as not adding value to the body because that body is valueless. However, the procedures, products and objects just listed are seen as signs of conspicuous consumption and, therefore, value, which elides the facts that white people also bleach and that whiteness is an aesthetic achievement. This analysis does not focus on whiteness but seeks to explore the dynamics of Black Atlantic zones’ skin bleaching as practice, politics, aesthetics, psyche, and knowledge, as well as its affective relationalities and entanglements as it decolonizes the practice in its movement away from Black pathology/lack/failure.

Skin and cosmetic skin lightening have continued to have deep political implications in Black Atlantic zones because of their raced affective, political, cultural and aesthetic economies, where skin shade still matters for one’s life chances: from the economy and the job market, to marriage and beauty. The case of the colonially constructed and socio-culturally instituted preference for lightness in Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean mestizaje, Brazilian mestiçagem, French Antillean metíssage, and UK/US/ English-speaking Caribbean/ South African/Ghanaian ‘brownness’ attests to this. Thus, within (post)colonial, ‘post-race’ societies we must look at local practices such as skin bleaching within a theoretical framework of coloniality, as inflected by global figurations of ‘race’, identity, gender and power and the historical context of European empires (Pierre, 2013; Hunter, 2011; Blay, 2011).

Let us not forget that whiteness also has a place in skin-lightening history. The discussion which follows looks historically at skin colour in terms of gender, ‘race’ and class and the emergence of the ‘English Rose’ in the UK and its colonies through whitening, makeup and bonetting, as well as the sexualized embrace of the mulata in Cuba and the denial of African descent but assertion of Caribbean indigeneity – indio – in Hispano-phone Caribbean (the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) constructions of skin shade, before turning to the ‘racial grammar’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2014) of skin lightening. The Black Nationalist urge to reject colonial and enslavement colourism as a skin shade habitus where lighter skin has cultural, symbolic and economic capital then follows. The discussion moves to ‘post-race’ aesthetics and skin lightening products as part of the flow of global capital and skin shade aesthetics through the example of South Africa’s skin-lightening product history and its most famous lightener to date – singer Nomasonto Mnisi – ‘Mzhoza’, as well as the latest skin-lightening pop star, celebrity Cameroonian-Nigerian Dencia and her dark spot corrector, ‘Whitenicious’. These women show that re-skinning the body is not about appearing ‘natural’ in a social context which views the body as a commodity, as Margaret Hunter (2011) claims. Rather, it is its very obvious fakeness which is significant, as it shows that its wearer has the money and the leisure time – that is, economic and social capital – to make the change happen. It can also be a change that is as permanent as one’s money or stylization preferences will allow, which in turn imparts cultural capital. Now, let us look at skin colour, ‘race’ performativity and colonial ‘race’ regimes in selected Black Atlantic sites.

Performative whiteness, skin colour in Europe and colonial ‘race’ regimes

Cosmetic and chemical skin lightening by white women is a centuries’ old practice within Europe, as it was practiced by ancient Greeks who used ceruse or white lead. White women in Europe used wheat powder (blaunchet) to whiten their faces whilst Italian women used waters, paints and plasters on their faces in order to whiten their skins (Blay, 2011). There was a rapid increase in the manufacture and use of cosmetics in the late 16th century (Poitevin, 2011), and as Richard Dyer (1997) remarks, much of the development of Western makeup was focused on whitening the face. Cosmetics use was denounced by its detractors because of the link between cosmetics and ‘fake’ beauty, as well as the loose morals of ‘the painted woman’. However, ‘white face’ was so necessary to Europeans that women continued to use skin whiteners, running the risk of accusations of prostitution or loose morals because the face was ‘unnatural’ (Pierre, 2013).

The impact of cosmetics on European women’s faces can be illustrated if we look at changes in the meaning of ‘complexion’ over time. In 1568, the word meant ‘the natural color, texture and appearance of the skin’, but by 1601, the meaning had transformed to ‘a coloring preparation applied to give a complexion to the face’ (Poitevin, 2011: 64). White European women’s complexions were applied through a preparation, literally painted on, to construct – to make up – the skin colour. In the 16th and 17th centuries, women applied rouges and used ceruse as a skin whitener. ‘The English Rose’, Elizabeth 1 herself, was constructed through artifice. She used ceruse and was also distinguished from her subjects by bathing regularly every month, whether she needed it or not, at a time when 17th century Europeans rubbed themselves down with a coarse cloth and rose water (Blay, 2011). Interestingly, according to early European travellers, Africans were extremely concerned with cleanliness and everyday personal hygiene was based on using ‘native soaps’ to cleanse the body, and palm oil, lard and shea butter ‘to anoint it’ (Blay, 2011:13). From our understandings about hygiene and body care today, Africans cleansed and moisturized their skins, so they already had a 21st century approach to skin care prior to colonialism. Elizabeth 1’s ‘toilet’ included a range of products, but the basis was white powder (Blay, 2011), and her fabricated white skin paleness became the Elizabethan beauty ideal, which again illustrates the racial importance of ‘white face’ to Europeans.

Ceruse produced the prized matte whiteness, but its lead contents’ toxicity damaged the skin and led to hair loss, and long-term use resulted in death. Its toxicity was increased when it was used alongside lye and ammonia in skin-whitening products (Blay, 2011). After centuries of use in Europe, once it became obvious that ceruse was harmful, it was made illegal. A 1724 Act in England enabled the inspection of drugs, medicines and other preparations sold within a 7-mile radius of London. This radius might intimate that skin whitening was an urban practice, but rural European women also bleached. Whitening the skin continued to be aesthetically, racially and commercially significant, and in the 1700s, Doctor Thomas Beddoes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Skin
• 1  A Brief Black/White/Light History of Skin Bleaching/Lightening/Toning
• 2  Self-Hate: An Old Debate Revisited
• 3  The Political and Libidinal Economies of Skin Shade: The Poor Bleach, the Middle Class/Elite Tone/Lighten
• 4  Nadinola and Glutathione: Refining and Advancing a Dangerous Practice
• Conclusion: Decolonizing Skin: Do Black People Have an Ethical Obligation Not to Bleach?
• Bibliography
• Index