: Inequity emerges from within the products we use, the technologies that govern us and the cultural imagination we build around both
Published Date – 11:59 PM, Mon – 4 December 23
By Pramod K Nayar
The term ‘fair’ has traditionally meant both — a light-skin colour and ‘just’. Except of course that the fair-skin has had undue advantages and all other skin-colours been unfairly, unjustly treated. Visual portrayals across products and services pay particular attention to skin tone. Cultural norms for beauty were determined, even in multiracial societies, premised on specific skin colour, as is widely known.
Shirley and After
Whiteness and lighter skin colour have been default settings even in technologies such as the camera and photographic printing. For several decades since the 1950s, Kodak’s famous ‘Shirley Card’ (named after the company’s original employee-model, Shirley Page) was used by numerous photo labs worldwide to calibrate skin tones, shadows and light during the printing process (which used Kodak printers).
Shirley and her skin colour thus became the norm against which all future calibrations of skin were based. Shirley also became the standard of beauty to which women aspired to.
Why, however, was this not a problem addressed by the other racial and skin types in the USA and Europe? A provisional answer would be: cosmetic products then did not cater to as many other racial types, and so their skin colour was not a factor in manufacturers’ calculations. A second answer would be: those who owned cameras and employed photography extensively were predominantly Caucasian. As dozens of Kodak promotional materials, now available online, show, cameras and films were advertised exclusively for white families.
It was only in the 1970s that, after the arrival of Jim Lyon as a photographer with Kodak, that anyone thought of employing black models. In 1996-97, Kodak produced a multiracial Shirley Card featuring African, Caucasian, and Asian women, although, oddly yet expectedly, all three women have rather pale complexions! Thus, over time, Kodak and other companies began manufacturing multiracial Shirley Cards and there were (even!) black and Latino Shirleys! Digital photography eventually made the Shirley Card redundant and software needed to adapt to multiracial skin colours. Adobe was one of the first companies to circulate a Latino woman’s image for its Photoshop software in 1988.
Let’s Face it
There are aspects to the emphasis on fair skin colour that should detain us.
The first is the employment of facial recognition software that, as studies in algorithmic surveillance from the sociologist Ruha Benjamin and others demonstrate, is biased against black races when predictive policing measures and technologies are instituted. That is, facial recognition software tags more black-skinned persons as potential criminals and deviants. The technological design, the algorithm, itself is discriminatory. It is not, so to speak, fair.
The second is the self-promotional and aspirational aspects of this emphasis. The overwhelming cultural authority that the fair skin appears to possess is influential in determining standards of beauty that individuals seek and hope to acquire. This is why music star Michael Jackson’s slow whitening over time, for mysterious reasons, was deemed to be ‘deracination’, a mode of attracting and retaining his multiracial audiences.
There is a third, lesser known, aspect of coding skin colour. The GRID Arendal Project, in collaboration with the UN’s Environmental Program (UNEP), created a ‘Skin Color Map (Indigenous People)’ as early as 2009. The project states its reasons for such a map:
The twin role played by the skin — protection from excessive UV radiation and absorption of enough sunlight to trigger the production of vitamin D — means that people living in the lower latitudes, close to the Equator, with intense UV radiation, have developed darker skin to protect them from the damaging effects of UV radiation. In contrast, those living in the higher latitudes, closer to the Poles, have developed fair skin to maximize vitamin D production.
Cognitive Equity
Years ago the pioneering critic Frantz Fanon spoke of the ‘epidermalisation’ that resulted in the internalisation of complexes of inferiority when the black person is embedded in a racialised system. Not only did the black person see himself or herself as inferior, but s/he also wished to ‘deracialise’ one’s identity, say, by marrying a white person. Fanon was pointing to the complete absence of equity in a system wherein the law or the economy itself was unfair. But inequity is not produced or addressed by just the legal apparatus: it emerges from within the products we use, the technologies that govern us and the cultural imagination we build around both.
The media researcher Lorna Roth investigating the Kodak history of skin-tone driven technology observes that when Kodak created the consumer film, Gold Max, it was initially described as being able ‘to photograph the details of a dark horse in low light’. Roth writes:
I suspect this was Kodak’s code for informing consumers it was the right film for photographing darker skin tones.
Recognising the importance of this history, Roth embarked on a project to examine colour bias, and called it The Color Balance Project. The aim was, she writes, to understand and develop ‘cognitive equity’. She defines cognitive equity as
A notion of cultural and racial equity that does not revolve around legislation, statistics and access to institutions, but rather is an intelligent strategy for creating and promoting equity by inscribing a wider dynamic-range or continuum of skin tones into common products, visual technologies, and design practices.
In her study she examines dolls and mannequins, cosmetics, prostheses and even bandages. Roth notes that manufacturers are beginning to see how their colour codes have inherent biases. For example, ‘manufacturers slowly begin to recognise that not all skin can be medically camouflaged by one or two bandage tones’.
Over a period of time, Roth hopes, such a cognitive equity through the products and services we use, the standards and norms of beauty will change and ‘multiracial beauty norms would enable children with darker skins to grow up with fewer chances of developing a “color complex”’.
The need for cognitive equity has never been stronger, Roth suggests, even as the project literally and metaphorically testifies to a history of unfair weather where
Fair is foul and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
