Brown is the Color Of…
By Safa Ahmed
“What’s your least favorite color?” The girls in my kindergarten class used to ask each other.
“Duh,” most of them, including me, would reply, “My least favorite color is brown.”
That made sense, right? Brown was the color of mud stuck to white sneakers and dirt splattered on brand-new toys. Brown was the color of crumbly dead leaves, food that had gone bad, and slimy-looking bugs. Brown was the color of the least acceptable kind of stain to have on your clothes. In my five-year-old head, brown was the color of ugly things.
It turns out it’s not just kindergarten girls who think like this. In South Asian cultures, there are very black-and-white beauty standards.
Literally.
If you’re fair-skinned, you’re considered beautiful. If you’re anything darker than lily-white, you’ll be referred to as “kali,” or “dark,” and society will swarm you with homemade scrubs and skin lightening creams to try and “cure” your natural skin color. My grandmother once told me that I should pray to have the best kind of kids - “white, white, white kids.”
I’m as brown, brown, brown as they come, and I don’t have patience for any kind of colorism. When people would tell me to stay out of the sun so I didn’t get darker, I’d laugh and say I was going to go work on my tan. When I’d see only the fair-skinned actresses of Bollywood being applauded for their beauty, I’d roll my eyes. I still love shocking my relatives by saying things like, “Main kali aur khubsurat hai” - I’m dark and beautiful.
I’m determined to love the color of my skin because for the longest time, I felt awkward about it. In kindergarten, I quietly wished that I could be as white and blonde and beautiful as my classmates. By middle school, I’d accepted that I just wouldn’t be considered pretty.
Then high school happened and the more I learned about South Asian culture and heritage, the more shocked I became at myself - at my own internalized racism.
Because skin color isn’t just a color or a marker of beauty. It’s a sign of your heritage. My skin color says, “Hey, if you come to my house, you’ll find a model of an autorickshaw on the shelf and a wall decal that shows verses from the Quran. We eat everything with spice and chili and red-hot peppers. We drink at least one mandatory cup of chai each day. We have family back home that catch monsoon rain under coconut trees and have run-ins with elephants and cobras. We tell all our jokes in Urdu, because everything sounds funnier in Urdu. We are as vibrant as our mirrored lehengas and as lively as the flashing string lights we put up for Eid.”
And what could be more beautiful than that?
After all, brown is the color of freshly made henna paste and the dye it leaves behind on a young woman’s hand. Brown is the color of traditional South Asian chai - not the Starbucks kind, but the kind that leaves your mouth feeling sweet for hours afterwards. Brown is the color of dirt-packed roads and homes and mosque floors. Brown is the color of a homeland older than almost every other civilization known to history. Brown is the color of maharajas and farmers alike. Brown is the color of the people who lived through famine and monsoons, through conquest and colonialism and immigration, and who have survived it all.
Brown is the color of beauty.
