Hi, xoJane. It is I, Brown Girl Faz.
The first time I experienced racism was in a classroom when I was nine years old. I didn’t know what was happening, but I understood that there was a lot of hate there while my teacher loomed over me and said, “You know why I didn’t call on you to answer my questions? Because your skin is black.”
She spat the word black like it gave her boils.
I’m from Singapore. One of the richest nations in the world, touted as a cultural and religious melting pot with racially harmonious Rainbow Brites running around throwing glitter in the air. I’m calling bullshit. I have never felt like I belonged in this country a single day of my life.
Products that are supposed to whiten your vaginas may be new to the beauty market in Asia, but the correlation between dark skin and “dirtiness” is not anything new. You don’t even have to look further than the makeup counters and drugstores –- no colors exist after a certain shade of beige.
I should explain the racial make-up of Singapore:
It is a country of 5 million people, with Chinese making up 74% of the population, Malays -13%, Indians - 9% and the rest are Eurasians and other minority ethnicities. Right from the time you are born, your ID tells you what race you are. Nobody identifies themselves as Singaporean first; your racial identity is what you are first and foremost.
I was already a cultural mess to begin with -– unlike most of Singapore whose first languages are their arterial languages (i.e., the Chinese speak Mandarin, the Malays speak Malay, Indians speak Tamil), I come from an English-speaking Indian family.
So while kids hung out with other kids who spoke their mother tongue at recess, I spent my lunchtime solo with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and Enid Blyton.
In hindsight, what appalls me most is not how merciless my peers were in school, but how many of the educators were equally if not more vindictive. The teacher I mentioned earlier? She taught me English, Math and Science for two years and made me sit by myself right at the back of the class. The whole two years I was made to feel worthless and disgusting, and the entire time I thought it was my fault.
I was to blame because I had skin that matches the earth. I deserved it all.
When I was 11, we were told to write poetry and present it in class. A boy wrote about me. Not a sappy puppy love letter, mind you –- it was a poem about how fat I was, how black I was and how I was a mess, I shouldn’t exist. Instead of doing anything about it, the teacher (a different one) laughed with him and with the rest of the class.
High school was no exception of course. People tend to think that just because I’m Indian, I couldn’t speak anything else other than Indian languages but my multi-lingual background allowed me into a world where people spoke about you in languages they thought you didn’t understand.
Let me tell you –- oblivion can be blissful. I can never erase the things people have said about me in front of me just because they thought I wouldn’t understand.
The only dark skinned girl in the room
At 15, when my self-esteem was probably at its lowest, I walked past a bunch of guys talking openly about me: “If Faz were fairer, she’d be pretty.”
Keling (the Indian equivalent of n*gger). Burnt. Black skin. Dirty. I’ve been called the worst names from fellow Singaporeans.
It’s funny because one of the lines in the Singapore pledge is “We are the citizens of Singapore… Regardless of race, language or religion.” You’d recite this pledge every morning in school for at least 10 years of your life, but who actually means what they pledge?
Which is why I love being in the US –- there’s foundation that matches my skin, I see Indian, Chinese and African-American people on TV and I don’t feel like people are constantly judging me based on the color of my skin.
While I work and surround myself with people who never look at my skin color as something that defines me, I walked into an elevator just last week and had two guys talking about me in Malay. Of course I told them off as I stepped out, but it’s so disheartening.
I spent an hour looking through local magazines for a dark-skinned person and I couldn’t find any. What I could find were pages and pages of whitening products. Minority races on the main English TV channel are never main characters -– they are usually obese and made fun of (don’t get me started about how I’m a US Size 8 and “obese” in Asia).
Cross-racial elation going on here y’all
For now, as far as I’m concerned, I know it starts with me. I will call anybody out for racism, I will continue writing and featuring people of all colors and sizes in my work, I will teach my children that your skin is something you should be so proud of because skin itself is a miracle, no matter what shade of awesome you are.
One day maybe Singapore will follow suit.
This is a great read for all you people out there. As a fellow Indian, I can completely commensurate with the Indian girl who wrote this article on behalf of Indians who felt and feel segregated in society. This is a real issue that has to be dealt with. And mind you, I am Indian and GAY. If you’re with a Gay Indian, you have a FETISH- a fervent lust for dark hairy men.
![A response letter to a very homophobic picture placed beside a balanced editorial piece on same sex civil unions. I urge you to take time to read the points brought up by Mr Ng Yi-Sheng.
Dear Andy Ho, As a gay man, I’d like to thank you for sharing your views in your article on Saturday May 19, p.A38, “Same-sex union can’t be labelled ‘marriage’”. I truly appreciate the fact that you’re standing up for civil unions, which is more than any other senior writer is doing so far. However, I would not like to thank whichever editor was responsible for commissioning Adam Lee to print that huge anti-gay logo beside your editorial. It is offensively homophobic, almost inflammatorily so, just as star and crescent crossed out would be anti-Muslim or a female symbol crossed out would be anti-woman. I think you’ll agree that it misrepresents the fact that your article is a good deal more balanced than that. I myself am in favour of same-sex marriage, and I’d like to two points in your article which I believe are problematic. First, you draw on the idea of marriage being akin to a trademarked symbol, not unlike McDonald’s or Yale University. It’s not. It’s a concept that’s evolved over the years and is interpreted differently by different cultures. In the same way that “porridge” and “carrot” mean different things to people in Singapore and New York, “marriage” means different things to an 18th century Chinese merchant with ten stay-at-home wives and a 21st century Filipino household where husband and wife work in different countries for years on end. Currently, our standard definition of marriage is a union two people make because they are in love and want to support each other. Children have little to do with it. And of course, sterile opposite-sex couples are allowed - almost encouraged - to adopt. Same-sex couples should also have that right, given that studies have shown they are equally good parents as their opposite-sex counterparts, if not better. Also, remember that “gay marriage” is not an abstract concept: there are already ten countries in the world which allow same-sex marriage. Some people with these marriage certificates are living in Singapore. If you’re attempting to limit the definition of marriage to opposite-sex couples, you’re pretty much trying to close the stable door after the horses have bolted. Second, you claim that extending marriage rights to same-sex couples would “tarnish [the] symbolic value” of marriage. Though this statement is too abstracted to be proven right or wrong, I’d like to point out that contemporary societies which have legalised same-sex marriage have seen no harm come to opposite-sex marriage: there are no climbing divorce rates, no higher instances of abuse, no dramatic declines in childbirth. The concept may have changed, but actual people aren’t suffering. Once again, I’d like to thank you for your support of same-sex civil unions. As you know, this year’s PinkDot is on Saturday, 30 June at Hong Lim Park. I hope you’ll come. I’m going to make a large sign saying “I support civil unions” so that you can hold it for everyone to see. That is the message that Singaporeans need to hear. Yours sincerely, Ng Yi-Sheng Writer, reporter and educator](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m49i9qzG0f1qaoacbo1_500.jpg)
![A response letter to a very homophobic picture placed beside a balanced editorial piece on same sex civil unions. I urge you to take time to read the points brought up by Mr Ng Yi-Sheng.
Dear Andy Ho, As a gay man, I’d like to thank you for sharing your views in your article on Saturday May 19, p.A38, “Same-sex union can’t be labelled ‘marriage’”. I truly appreciate the fact that you’re standing up for civil unions, which is more than any other senior writer is doing so far. However, I would not like to thank whichever editor was responsible for commissioning Adam Lee to print that huge anti-gay logo beside your editorial. It is offensively homophobic, almost inflammatorily so, just as star and crescent crossed out would be anti-Muslim or a female symbol crossed out would be anti-woman. I think you’ll agree that it misrepresents the fact that your article is a good deal more balanced than that. I myself am in favour of same-sex marriage, and I’d like to two points in your article which I believe are problematic. First, you draw on the idea of marriage being akin to a trademarked symbol, not unlike McDonald’s or Yale University. It’s not. It’s a concept that’s evolved over the years and is interpreted differently by different cultures. In the same way that “porridge” and “carrot” mean different things to people in Singapore and New York, “marriage” means different things to an 18th century Chinese merchant with ten stay-at-home wives and a 21st century Filipino household where husband and wife work in different countries for years on end. Currently, our standard definition of marriage is a union two people make because they are in love and want to support each other. Children have little to do with it. And of course, sterile opposite-sex couples are allowed - almost encouraged - to adopt. Same-sex couples should also have that right, given that studies have shown they are equally good parents as their opposite-sex counterparts, if not better. Also, remember that “gay marriage” is not an abstract concept: there are already ten countries in the world which allow same-sex marriage. Some people with these marriage certificates are living in Singapore. If you’re attempting to limit the definition of marriage to opposite-sex couples, you’re pretty much trying to close the stable door after the horses have bolted. Second, you claim that extending marriage rights to same-sex couples would “tarnish [the] symbolic value” of marriage. Though this statement is too abstracted to be proven right or wrong, I’d like to point out that contemporary societies which have legalised same-sex marriage have seen no harm come to opposite-sex marriage: there are no climbing divorce rates, no higher instances of abuse, no dramatic declines in childbirth. The concept may have changed, but actual people aren’t suffering. Once again, I’d like to thank you for your support of same-sex civil unions. As you know, this year’s PinkDot is on Saturday, 30 June at Hong Lim Park. I hope you’ll come. I’m going to make a large sign saying “I support civil unions” so that you can hold it for everyone to see. That is the message that Singaporeans need to hear. Yours sincerely, Ng Yi-Sheng Writer, reporter and educator](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m49i9qzG0f1qaoacbo1_1280.jpg)
