The Unbearable Whiteness Of Being: How Malaysia Taught Me What Racism Was
A century of being abused at the hands of sadistic European colonizers reveals that Malaysians are not problem solvers, but abusers themselves.
So back when I was nine and living in Thailand, some of us kids from the Malaysian embassy were hand-picked to participate in a dance recital. We were told that it’d simply be an after-school activity in which we’d learn the traditional art of Thai dancing and I flat-out refused.
My protests were shut down by moms and overbearing ladies from the embassy and, eventually, and miserably, I had to acknowledge defeat.
Nothing against Thai art forms, I was just vehemently against any social activity with kids who attended different schools than me, those I wasn’t friends with, and felt uneasy around, because it’d be awkward. They were people I saw once in a while at embassy gatherings and that was it.
After a few months of being driven to a dance studio in a white van with nine other Malay kids, and measurements had been taken for elaborate traditional Thai outfits, the embassy ladies finally announced that the whole unwelcome scheme that’d been forced upon us, especially me, did, in fact, have a point: we were to perform at a large private banquet in the coming weeks for the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad.
His visit to Bangkok and our involvement meant being able to miss some school to rehearse at the venue, so there were some positives to the whole arrangement. On the night of the performance, after having been outfitted, excessive make-up applied to the five of us Malay girls, and our hair pulled back into tight buns and adorned with floral arrangements, a lot of waiting around happened. The oldest girls, about eleven, Hetty and Fatimah, who also happened to be the light-skinned girls of the group, were giggling over our drastic transformation.
They then decided between the two of them to rate the five of us girls from prettiest to ugliest for no other reason than to satiate themselves.
Listen, it’s not news that kids, and girls especially, can be assholes. Cruel behavior is learned from an early age, often at home, and some girls learn to be particularly wicked under the soft, sweet, and delicate exterior which is their immunity, seeing as it’s a buffer that never fails to fool and influence others.
The rest of us sat quietly on the wooden floor of a classic Thai village-style house that’d been transformed into our dressing room, next door to the sprawling dinner party. We smiled deferentially, though bemused, as Hetty and Fatimah unabashedly gave themselves first and second place and then assessed us remaining three girls, pointed at the third prettiest girl, and then bestowed upon me the honor of fourth place and the youngest, smallest, and darkest girl of the group, fifth. I glanced over at her as Hetty and Fatimah shared a slow, awkward, sympathetic laugh as they searched our faces for a desired reaction, completely oblivious to their emotional and mental defectiveness.
Her face fell, and beneath the heavy powder, black eyeliner, mascara, and bright red lipstick, I saw the humiliation, and possible damage, commence.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a bitch move to make right before a kid was about to perform on stage in front of a huge audience for the first time. All I thought at that moment was that Hetty and Fatimah were cunts, and I couldn’t wait for the whole situation to finally be over.
I didn’t understand beauty standards at the time, or even issues of skin color and identity, because I was in elementary school and spent most of my time outdoors at the park or in a pool and thus couldn’t care less about how brown I was. Nor did I understand the obsession with being fair-skinned or white, as I was surrounded by diversity and had Thai, American, Canadian, Korean, African, Indian, Israeli, and French friends at school or who were neighbors who had darker skin than I did, and none of us ever mentioned it. We were all different shades of brown. No one gave a shit.
Over the years, it was mostly the fair-skinned Asian friends I had who were deeply unhappy with themselves while frequently demeaning others for how they looked, particularly brown girls and women, myself included.
The nastiness was unparalleled in Kuala Lumpur, for some reason, with teenagers and adults quick to remind you of your “place” in status-obsessed Malaysian society. I only really learned what racism, and internalized racism was after moving to Kuala Lumpur. One night, I was watching TV in the living room when a commercial for a product called Fair and Lovely came on. The storyline basically went like this:
Dark-skinned Malay girl can’t get a basic Malay guy to notice her. She watches enviously as her light-skinned Malay friend gets all the male attention and becomes depressed. Light-skinned girl consoles her implied ugly friend by producing a bottle or tube of Fair and Lovely and advises her, like really good friends do, to use it.
“It’s time to start the transformation process, sweetie. You should be embarrassed of your inferiority.” - Asian skin-whitening ads taking over where European colonialists left off.
This is universally interpreted as, pigmentation-wise, you’re unattractive and you’re the problem for not striving to be fair-skinned like I am. That’s why I get all the basic, shallow guys and you don’t.
The unbelievably crass and facile commercial literally made my teenage self fall on my ass laughing by the end of it — after using the cream, dark-skinned girl re-emerges fair-skinned, confident, and deliriously happy, and basic Malay guy falls in love with her! Who wouldn’t want to live in this deranged, heart-warming fantasy?
You know the people who’re behind these asinine marketing campaigns are probably adult versions (I use the word adult very loosely) of eleven-year-old Hetty and Fatimah and other kids like them. At some point, you realize that they’re people with deep-seated, persistent self-esteem issues who believe other people should feel bad about themselves too. How dare you feel comfortable in your brown skin? You should be miserable and know your place in our white-obsessed society.
This isn’t some new obsession but another great sediment left over from hundreds of years of colonialism, from which the psychological damage has been perpetuated by locals, instead of being addressed and corrected, to infect younger generations. You’d think leaders would’ve intensely tried to reverse all the damage colonizers had enabled with shitty systems of abuse meant to denigrate and control Asians of all ethnic groups, but the exact opposite happened.
Those systems of abuse were adopted and encouraged by Malaysians to subsequently…abuse each other!
The shallowness of Malaysians, in general, is evident in the inclination for Euro-Asian hosts on TV, light-skinned, mixed-raced folks representing Malaysia in international beauty pageants and royal families, and the global skin-lightening product market size, which was valued at USD 8.3 billion in 2018 with Asian countries making up a major segment.
As the latter article notes, “a World Health Organization survey found that nearly 40 percent of women polled in nations including China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea said they regularly used whitening products. In India, 60 percent of the skincare market consisted of whitening products.”
That Asians have jumped onto the bandwagon to join white supremacists in believing that whiteness denotes privilege, superiority, and definitive beauty is a pain in the ass for the rest of us because it gives rise to a whole range of systemic issues and as a result undermines society, culture, and individual well-being.
As though it wasn’t bad enough that Western industry giants like L’oreal, Unilever, and Proctor and Gamble who churn out these skin-lightening products for the masses are monsters without faces who operate on massive marketing budgets and teams, and like other major corporations exist to exploit human vulnerability for profit. It’s when these products, a lot of which are illegal and contain highly dangerous ingredients are peddled by tone-deaf local entrepreneurs like Hasmiza Othman, who, by her own admission, spent a staggering RM20 million on advertising in 2016 alone.
Ostensibly a monster with a face, Hasmiza Othman, more famously known as Dato’ Seri Vida, made her millions with products like “Qu Puteh” (translation: “I Am White”).
The tagline, or manic chant of said product goes, “Qu putih, qu putih, barulah putih,” or “I am white, I am white, I am finally white.”
Said no self-respecting Asian ever.
I don’t know, man, I always thought “change comes from within” or whatever made more sense. It’s more hard work, though, so that’s probably why it’s the less popular route. It doesn’t come in a bottle with instructions. The results take a bit longer to perceive than 3 to six weeks—it’s an ongoing, uphill process. I imagine you can’t literally sell “Change Comes from Within” as a topical skincare product because 1) your ass will get sued by halfwits for no “white” results—the only result that matters and 2) even if it was intended as a placebo and came with metaphysical directions intended to influence the user’s self-esteem, psychologically damaged weaklings wouldn’t see any value in anything that doesn’t offer instant gratification.
Imagine not being in control of yourself but owned by other people’s perceptions and expectations of you and an increasingly disturbing idealization of another race that pressures you to become something you’re not.
The desire to be fair-skinned or white is an idea fed to the masses by superficial forces that profit off of the breakdown of your mental and emotional health, and (probably) want you to feel empty, insecure, and inadequate—how they feel about themselves (probably). I’m not one to look at human beings through rose-tinted glasses. It’s more logical, I think, to understand the sociopaths behind these massive dignity-destroying products and marketing campaigns and what they get out of it. E.g. money, control, pleasure.
The glorification of whiteness outside of the West is like that tragic Chappelle Show sketch. Man, how annoying must it be to put in all that effort, whether it’s bleaching your skin, cultivating for yourself or your kids white, Western identities, dating only white people with the hopes that others notice you (falsely) rising out of the mediocrity you suffer, and adopting some Western accent or Western cultural values that contradict or undermine heterogeneous Asian ones, only to still be confronted with the horrible reality in the end: you’re still not white.
In fact, you’re probably still as mediocre as when you started. Possibly worse. Being a person of worth has little to nothing to do with outward appearances. The truth hurts.
Most people don’t trouble themselves with meaning or any honest inquiry into one’s own existence. It’s inconvenient and not fun. Most people aren’t accustomed to exercising self-awareness. In Malaysia, introspection is not practiced. People are taught to look outward, not inward. Judge others, not yourself. Control others, not yourself. And the meaninglessness of existence has never been more apparent when observing how the masses have regressed, distancing themselves from their most natural self. No doubt, that, along with other contributing factors, leads to the global rise in personality disorders like narcissism. That malady in which individuals lose their true selves and no longer exist as real persons.
In Malaysia, people are reminded at all times of what power, popularity, and perfection look like — on TV, billboards, magazine covers, social media, etc.
Took me some years to figure it out, but I realized after returning to Malaysia that this country seems more like an abused girl that suffers from a crippling, deep-seated shame, has no real identity at her core, so she desperately tries to portray herself to be what she’s not, by adopting false, racist ideals of abusers and putting on a performance in which she plays different roles with different masks, hoping nobody will notice the façade.
The cycle of abuse continues unbridled, enforced by those who lost their true selves long ago, and never tried to recover that core from which one’s identity is chaotically ruminated, understood, developed, formed, and protected. Could take years, speaking from experience,
Imagine being born into a part of the world that proudly produced thousands of years of profound values and wisdom, that which white people and Westerners have always borrowed, adopted, or were envious of, and what your existence comes down to is, “I want to be white.”
