Topic: It’s amazing how much colorism and fair skin preferences predate colonialism.
Anonymous A started this discussion 2 hours ago#135,976
Japan, China, and India all glorified fair skin. It was a standard of beauty. Ethiopia too, dating to when their empire expanded into the Arabian peninsula. They often still use the word “barya” (slave) in Amharic to refer to darker people, often treated as “invaders from the south.” South Indian women still bathe with turmeric as a natural skin lightener. Korean women prized pale and flawless skin. Japanese women began powdering their faces in the Edo period. It’s amazing how much more of this is and how social ranking and caste favored light skin long before the injection of European colonialism and Western mass media.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade double-posted this 2 hours ago, 1 minute later, 11 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,444,001
It’s almost like Asian colorism was based on the fact that Asians turn tan when they’re out in the sun and farmers who had a lower social status became more tan when they were working out in the sun, and this form of colorism didn’t exist in societies where people didn’t look noticeably more tan from working out in the sun. It’s almost as if the reason for this is incredibly obvious and completely unrelated to what was happening in Europe.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade triple-posted this 2 hours ago, 2 minutes later, 14 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,444,002
It would also be worth mentioning that in Ancient Rome, Europeans enslaved Europeans and it was not uncommon to take white Germanic prisoners of war as slaves because slavery wasn’t race based back then.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade quadruple-posted this 2 hours ago, 4 minutes later, 18 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,444,004
…it’s also worth mentioning that Asian colorism doesn’t have anything to do with the trans Atlantic slave trade. The Chinese made contact with East Africa but they didn’t colonize Africa. Just because Asia had colorism doesn’t inherently mean it had anything to do with prefixing Africans as inferior. When Asians from Indonesia made contact with Madagascar, instead of colonizing or enslaving Africans, they interbred with them to the point now where all their descendants living in Madagascar have Bantu DNA. Obviously colorism in Asia is bad, but modern racism against black people in Asia that was influenced by Europeans is completely separate from what was going on before Europeans.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade quintuple-posted this 2 hours ago, 8 minutes later, 26 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,444,006
The average Malagasy person in Madagascar with Indonesian ancestry has 50% sub Saharan African Bantu DNA. Obviously colorism was a thing in Asia, but it’s not like Asians always thought of Africans as inferior. Having a bias against members of your own race for having tan skin from working outside because you associate that with poverty and colonizing and enslaving people because you assert that they’re biologically inferior aren’t remotely the same thing and didn’t lead to remotely the same outcomes when Europeans and Asians made contact with sub Saharan Africans.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade sextuple-posted this 1 hour ago, 9 minutes later, 35 minutes after the original post[^][v]#1,444,007
Technically, Madagascar was settled by Asians first and then later Sub Saharan Africans also settled there. But instead of some sort of racial hierarchy they just sort of merged into one group of people. There’s no reason why when Europeans reached Africa they inherently had to do what they did and not every group of people that reached Africa did the same thing.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade joined in and replied with this 51 minutes ago, 2 minutes later, 1 hour after the original post[^][v]#1,444,017
@previous (Meta)
Name calling isn’t really an argument, it’s what you do when you’re low IQ and want an easy way to dismiss ideas that make you uncomfortable. You only say the n word because you don’t want to think.