Beauty is Skin (Color) Deep: Part 2
(This is a continuation of Part 1.)
When we started Almost Asian Almost American, our logo first featured a darker-skinned woman because we wanted to highlight that Asian Americans aren’t all one color, despite what Hollywood may portray. However, one of our members pointed out that we all have relatively light skin, a characteristic that comes with certain privileges and didn’t exactly match the woman on our logo. We were at an impasse: do we use a darker-skinned figure to signal inclusivity but potentially misrepresent our privilege, or do we choose a lighter-skinned figure and once again perpetuate the overrepresentation of light-skinned Asian figures? Ultimately we decided to create a rotating logo featuring women with various skin colors because Asian Americans come in different shapes, sizes, and colors - and every single one of us is beautiful.
As a woman of color and a Filipina-American, there are so many conflicting narratives about beauty and what it means that the nuances often get lost in the telling. We strive to be beautiful because society teaches us that we should be. But our beauty does not belong to us; instead it is dictated by prejudice and power. In part one of this article, we examined what colorism is and how deeply entrenched it is in the Philippines and United States (but really, the whole world as well).
Wherever I am, it seems like my physical traits are never truly celebrated or accepted as the norm. In the Philippines, I am told my skin tone is not the right one: I am too dark to be held up as the ideal beauty. In America, I am fetishized, my looks called ‘foreign’ and ‘exotic.’ American men want to date me because my features signal submissiveness and fantasy. I am simultaneously too much and too little, not quite the right shape, size, or shade. For women like me, our looks are subsumed into narratives of colonization, race, sexualization, and privilege. We cannot own our bodies because other people own them first.
In America, I am less aware of my skin tone. There are many more shades of brown, and being tan is a good thing. But while my friends and I tend to be more brown and more accepted, I still feel less visible. When people in America think of ‘Asian,’ they don't think of someone who looks like me. Asian people are associated with paler skin, and it's almost impossible to find someone that looks like me in the media. To so many people in America, Asia is represented by actors and actresses like Constance Wu, Ross Butler, and even Priyanka Chopra. They all have something in common: they are all extremely light skinned Asians and do not represent the diverse colors of the Asian skin.
"We strive to be beautiful because society teaches us that we should be. But our beauty does not belong to us; instead it is dictated by prejudice and power."
But realizing those things has also given me the ammunition to replace them with other, radical ideas of self-love, acceptance, and rebellion against colonial and patriarchal mindsets. I am tired of being told that I cannot be comfortable in my own body. I am tired of living in two worlds that tell me either I am too dark or that my beauty is ‘exotic.’ I refuse to live my life under the shadow of the colonial rhetoric that tells me my body and my looks are either too Filipino or too foreign. I refuse to let my personhood be dependent on misogynistic narratives of race and sexuality. It has taken me years to work through the layers of skin color prejudice both in Filipino culture and here in the US. But now I have reached the point where I can look at the mirror and smile at my own reflection. I may not be the perfect color to others, but I am learning to love the skin I'm in.
