With the unfortunate and tragic death of George Floyd in the United States, the freedom and equality loving people across the world are standing in solidarity with a fight against systematic racism.
A kind of racism that has not only managed to stay alive in the modern world, but is also thriving under the protection of corrupt establishments who support and bail out racially motivated cops and lawmakers.
People across several continents are joining the fight, in an attempt to not only put an end to the lynching of black men but also fight out the mentality that acts as a breeding ground for such acts.
And thus a number of B-town celebrities have also joined the campaign, here in India, with names like Kareena Kapoor and Deepika Padukone, fashionably using the hashtag – #BlackLivesMatter.
And I say ‘fashionably’, because something about this ‘support’ doesn’t fit right.
There’s a sense of hypocrisy in this support for the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in Bollywood. And it stems from the fact that a lot of these celebrities who have now joined the bandwagon of a worldwide cause against racism, have previously propagated colourism by acting as brand ambassadors of fairness products through rather shocking adverts.
The likes of Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Shah Rukh Khan, John Abraham, Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor, Vidya Balan, Aishwarya Rai, Yami Gautam – to name a few, have often been featured on advertisements that not only promote the false idea that ‘fair is better’, but also instil a sense of inferiority among those with darker complexions.
Their ads tell you, that if your skin tone is on the darker side, not only will you be unable to achieve anything in life (including love), but you pretty much don’t matter.
The result of years of such cultural nourishing is that – India is now the largest consumer of fairness products. It is a multi-billion dollar industry in the country itself – a fact that reeks of a sense of self-hatred, that has been ingrained in our minds.
This sense of ‘colourism’ that Hindi film industry has long perpetuated and propagated can also be witnessed by their lack of dark complexioned ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’ in the lead. The lack of diversity and equal representation of all skin colours on the big screen is so appalling, that it essentially makes you wonder – why hasn’t there been a ‘movement’ of this nature to fight for discrimination at home?
While America deals with a different kind of racism, we in India too have to do some introspection to understand that all colours are equally beautiful and prejudice has no place in a modern civil world.
Let us stand in solidarity with George Floyd and those countless other black men and women who have been a victim of constant racial prejudice in the United States, but let us also fight the fight of discrimination at our own homes, with the same amount fervour and passion.