White days, white nights in white satin with white lace

Apr 08, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I spoke to this young lady who does designing with a certain newspaper. I asked her not to misinterpret my curiosity as an intrusion into her work, because I have no such authority. My interest was the relentless light-complexioned bodies that appear in her advertisements.
She said that she goes onto Google Images and pulls down the faces. I then questioned why no dark-skinned visage. I stumped her. She couldn’t answer.
Months later, the situation remained unchanged. I went to the owner of a certain commercial enterprise to inquire if the faces on their advertisements are sent to the newspaper. She wasn’t in the country, but the manager said that the store does not design the page. At the time of writing, the same old story goes on.
What you are about to read here is the product of research. The reader has the choice of testing what is contained in this article. If I am contradicted, then I will discontinue this column. Here is my challenge if you are going to take me on. I am contending that over ninety (yes, as large as ninety) percent of the faces that appear in all advertisements in the four daily newspapers (KN, SN, Chronicle and Guyana Times) and all (yes, all) local ads on television are of light complexion.
And when I mean light complexion I am not referring even to sapodilla brown, but light skin in the vicinity of whiteness, though not white as in Caucasian colour or very light colour which in common parlance we call red-skinned. As to dark hue (like me, Uncle Adam, Uncle Dale Andrews and people like us), that is less than one percent.
Now here is the challenge. You have to prove that it is less than ninety percent. I have opened up myself to vulnerability by going as high as ninety percent, but I will stick with that number, because this column is the product of observation that went on for more than two years. I spoke with that young lady referred to above more than a year ago.
If you are going to win me, you have to prove that less than ninety percent of the faces featured in the advertisements in Guyana are light-complexioned. Let me take the liberty of indulging in a little bit of chauvinism and say that I cannot lose.
We have gone back full circle to the fifties and sixties in Guyana, where most employees in the private sector were people who were light in skin colour and the advertisements featured people with that kind of hue. In this respect, the PNC Government, the PPP Government, Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan have failed.
As I type this, I have in my hand the book, “Nostalgias: Golden Memories of Guyana, 1940 -1980” by Godfrey Chin. On page 47 is the hockey team in 1961. Not one player is even brown skinned.
On page 81 is Radio Demerara’s Christmas party. No one is even of brown complexion. On page 128 is a celebration of a prize-giving ceremony in 1961 at Banks DIH. Everyone in that picture is European, Portuguese or Mulatto. On page 239, the Christmas party at Royal Bank of Canada is featured. All in the frame are European, Portuguese or Mulatto. Chin has a page that looks at men’s fashion in the late sixties; the male models were all European or Portuguese. There was one Mulatto.
The beauty queens from the fifties onwards were Portuguese or clear-complexioned Indians. This pattern was broken when the American Black Power movement swept the Caribbean, which coincided with republican status in Guyana. The PNC Government under President Burnham was overtly in favour of attacking the ubiquity of the light-complexion infamy. This emphasis on post-colonial aesthetic/cultural recovery remains one of Forbes Burnham’s great contributions to Independent Guyana.
One of the main vehicles for the clear complexion thing in this country is the Hindu film industry, commonly known in Guyana as Bollywood. It is truly shocking that in a country with one billion people, a majority of which are certainly not of light hue, there isn’t a leading actor of both genders that is even brown-skinned. The Hindu film industry is totally shameless when it comes to this.
It remains a mystery why human rights groups in India haven’t attacked this cultural and philosophical depravity. On the issue of private sector employment, the old aesthetic, cultural bias has crept back in. The lighter you are, the greater your chance of getting that job. Life in Guyana is indeed a tragedy.

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White days, white nights in white satin with white lace

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