Filipino Beauty Inheritance
Filipino Beauty Inheritance Illness isn’t the only thing the colonizers brought, but also eurocentric beauty ideals to pass down from one generation to the next.
“You’re so dark, you look like the help.”
Our people have internalized: the distaste of blackness the cravings of whiteness.
Clear your palate or else—nothing will ever satisfy your appetite. “
Ah, maganda [so beautiful]! I wish my skin was as fair as hers.”
Value should not be assigned based on the shade of your skin. Pale skin translates to: wealth, sophistication, privilege; the elites who could afford to escape harsh labor under the scorching sun. Dark complexion translates to: poverty, filthy, inferiority; the savages who needed to be cleansed and saved by the White man.
“If she wasn’t so dark she would be very beautiful.”
This is what my mother gave to me and what her mother gave to her; what a vicious cycle to have to break free of. I have disowned the obsession with whiteness that was inherited from the Philippines given to them by their “white saviors”; I have learned to wash out the stain of colorism instead of burning off my natural pigmentation with papaya soap and skin lightening creams; I have learned that self destruction is just as ugly as the white ideology that was shoved down my throat and spoon fed to me via American television and magazines.
-j.a. martyr