Thread by @indulekshmi16

Thread.

1/ Literally every single brown person in SG has said something about brown face and I’m really proud of them and I don’t need to repeat what they said. But let’s talk a little bit about brown skin and what it means. For reference, me at pride in bi pride flag colours.

2/ I love my skin colour. Like, I really love it, it is not some kind of fake pride. I think it is one of my best features and truthfully on some days I actually wish I were naturally a little darker and in summer I get my wish. But this hasn’t always been true for me.

3/ growing up in India I was bombarded with colourism. There are a thousand face whitening creams and I certainly tried my share of them. My mother and others taught me to do things to make me look fairer. Coming to Sg, it was even worse because now I was in the minority.

4/ Chinese people, since young, have been making fun of my skin colour. One kid with asked me with a smirk why Indians were still dark after generations in Singapore. A senior in school said that us juniors all “looked Indian” after a week at OBS (all of us except were sunburned)

5/ that and countless other microagressions, some about skin colour and some about other things. Someone said they couldn’t pair up with me for a first aid exercise because they were allergic to coconut (what?).

6/ as a teen I was made to hate myself and my skin colour and everything else. I read an article in the @STcom talking about inter-racial relationships and why there were fewer Chinese men dating Indian women coz of our “strong features”, than the other way around.

7/ at 17 I came out as bi and then has to deal with a whole other layer of insecurity wrt women. Several things happened around then and I started looking at myself differently and started gaining self esteem. But I had to break out of all the ridiculous things laid on me.

8/ all of this to say, #brownface is not some neutral harmless thing because Chinese people, even those who think they are not racist, did *everything possible* to make me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. They do not get to cosplay us after this.

9/ it took a lot of self esteem building and radically challenging internalized colourism and racism for me to love myself - my wavy hair, my brown skin, my curves, all of which many Chinese people and local media kept telling me were unattractive and undesirable. It was hard.

10/ brown skin is not politically neutral. It never has been. It has been our entire existence. To have someone do #brownface for laughs, after already spending all the time telling us how terrible it is how to have brown skin? Just fuck off already.