Culture

Indian Actors Express Support For BLM, Immediately Get Called Out For Endorsing Whitening Face Creams

#India
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https://twitter.com/Chandan0321/status/1266760127723581440

One of the bright spots to come from the last week has been the internet’s immediate and total hypocrisy shaming. What is hypocrisy shaming? It’s when people on the internet who possess elephant memories pull up old tweets, song lyrics, jokes, and skincare commercials that stand at odds with a celebrity’s current message/platform. We saw this with Glee’s Lea Michele, people are trying (and failing) to use it against Ellen Degeneres, and now we have Bollywood actors getting slammed for promoting BLM when they’ve endorsed skin-whitening creams in the past.

Can’t keep up? Hand up, it took me a second to understand the face cream shaming. I kept thinking… fairness cream? Is there a cream out there that makes people play by the rules? If you’re covered in fairness cream, do you always serve equal portions of dessert? Who on earth would ever be duped into buying this communist snake oil?

But then, I saw myself in the mirror and it all clicked. Not fairness like you go down on me, I go down on you. Fairness like redhead fairness. As in pasty, shirt-in-the-pool fairness. Splotchy clumps of freckles and skin that wrinkles like a cold scrotum by age 30. Fairness like a lifetime of sunscreen reminders. Sitting under three umbrellas pushed together, reading a book about chess strategies while your friends “lay out.”

Apparently it’s all the hotness in India. You’ve got movie stars pushing creams that enhance fairness. White-washing like you read about. I’ll bet those tubes of Garnier fairness+ instant coverage are going for $40 in the locked aisle at Rite Aid. And while the “hypocrisy” rankles me to the bone, I’m here for a different purpose: to provide a far easier, far cheaper, far less racist way for the continent of India to pale up.

This is my Halo rocket launcher right here. My Curt Schilling with the bloody sock. Old faithful, baby. As long as I have access to the Neutrogena broad spectrum SPF 70 face AND body stick, I will remain fairer than the day is long. This is the ultimate in fairness. Most people think you can only put a stick on your face. WRONG. You can roll this thing over your hairy arms, creating clumpy waves of arm hair and dissuading anyone from asking to use it after you. It’s like painting yourself with a paint roller. Sure, you’ll sweat like you’re wearing fire-retardant gel as part of some movie stunt, but you won’t be a shade darker than you were when you woke up. And that’s a fact, Jack.