Hmmm.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/16/facebook.skin.lightening.app/?hpt=C2
Short form: Vaseline has a Facebook application which will digitally “whiten” the skin in photos, to simulate the performance of a skin-whitening cream. This has enraged a lot of people, who see it as racist.
As did I, in fact. But then, I started to read the statement issues by Vaseline, and only got this far before my brain switched sides:
“Much like self-tanning products…”
Hmmm. If it’s racist to make a product that lightens the skin, then it seems to me it’s just as racist to make a product that *darkens* the skin. To suggest otherwise is to imply that it’s better to be dark than light… which is a generally recognized racist position to hold if you simply transpose “dark” and “light.”
So… hmmm. I’ve switched from seeing these skin lightening products as racist to seeing the *users* of these products as simply the Indian equivalent of orange-tanned Guidos.
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What does this make Michael Jackson? More or less of a role model?
This is a racist country. This morning I noted an editorial calling gun control laws racist. (I’ve not read it, but the title is enough to put me off.)
Well, a good case can be made that gun contol laws are anti-poor. People who would most benefit from firearms in their home would be people in high crime neighborhoods; and people who live in poor neighborhoods are often seen to be of various minorities.
IIRC, many of the gun laws we’ve been saddled with had their genesis with the Jim Crow laws of the post War Of Southern Aggression era, where the local Democrats passed laws to keep the freed blacks from arming themselves in order to defend themselves against the Klan and such.
http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBViewItem.asp?ID=581
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2698-Charlotte-Gun-Rights-Examiner~y2009m4d9-Repealing-racist-gun-laws
And this one makes a good point: http://www.examiner.com/x-1417-Gun-Rights-Examiner~y2009m3d4-Ignorance-racism-and-gun-control
“So when President Obama says “what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne,” demographics must not be excluded from the factors he thinks make Chicago and Cheyenne dissimilar enough to warrant recognizing different rights. ”
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