FYI: Skin Bleaching

Something I’ve noticed my front camera doing recently is that it lightens my skin colour shockingly. In a friend’s photoset, it is really prominent how light my face is.

Now I’ve noted that many people think I’m white, and I don’t really care about random people online raging about things online (and sometimes I have quite a lot of fun fucking with them), but when it comes to how I want to be seen to rational people, I can’t help but regret a phase that I and many PoC have gone through, and it is that of Skin Bleaching.

When I found out about it in high-school, I became obsessed with it! I would avoid the sun as much as possible, spend as much time in the dark as I could, and twice a day would apply Skin Whitening Cream (various brands over the years). I really wish I didn’t succumb to that, but I don’t hate anyone that did, does, or might do.

The media is very influential, and as a Chinese Girl growing up in a Western Society, it felt absolutely crucial to be as white as everyone else. In Asian countries the reasoning behind the process is that if you had dark skin, you were a laborer and were often outside, but if your skin was light you were well off and would spend more time indoors.

There is also a huge influence from Western cultures of 'You've got to be WHITE to be accepted' and frankly, I was convinced of that being true for all except this recent year of my life. It’s a hard thing to leave behind when literally "most of my friends are white" and I felt like if I wanted them to like me (which most before any I made in the last two years didn’t), I had to be like them.

I now have this amazing support network of friends with different struggles. I would never say that a struggle isn’t a struggle (despite my mother telling my anxiety wasn’t that much of an issue until I explained it better recently), but there is a thing called Privilege. If you’re a white male, you have more privilege than others, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have struggles. It simply means you don’t face the struggles that PoC, women, non-binary gender, trans, sexuality that isn’t straight, and many others do.

Check your privilege and work with people who don’t have as many. Why are you trying to fight us when you could be fighting the systems that put us down?