By Wajahat Ali, The New York Times, November 13, 2021
My 5-year-old daughter, Nusayba, twirled around in her princess dress, fixing her silver tiara and checking out her newly applied eye shadow and red lipstick in the bathroom mirror. Then she examined her beautiful, brown skin.
“I don’t like my skin color,” she declared. “I wish my skin was lighter. It’s prettier.”
Her comment, several months ago, was a gut punch. Up to that point, my wife and I were confident that we had protected our daughter from the curse of colorism, a toxic inheritance that still poisons our perceptions of self and beauty.
I grew up in a Pakistani immigrant home, where the obsession with pursuing light skin tone was as common as eating dal-chawal with our hands or hearing the adhan for prayer. An auntie at the birthday party would offer comments such as, “She’s so beautiful, but, tragically, she is dark-skinned” or “For a girl with dark skin, she’s actually pretty.”
This brutal and genderedcolor hierarchy is unleashed as soon as we exit the womb. Even babies aren’t spared. “Oh, so gora-chitta (white)! The parents are so lucky,” you’ll still hear in maternity wards from Fremont, Calif., to New Delhi.
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