Notions Of Beauty Around The World

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/09/26/226565319/around-the-world-notions-of-beauty-can-be-a-real-beast :smt104

 

This prize of "white skin" is directly related to social status and hierarchies — and the legacy of slavery — around the world. Racial aesthetic politics aren't confined to one country or the other; they're playing out around the world.

It's certainly the case in Brazil, one of the largest markets for beauty products in the world — $42 billion in sales last year. It ranks third behind only the U.S. and Japan, according to a recent report by the Brazilian Association of the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Industry.


"To be beautiful you have to be straight-haired and be fair-haired," says Jana Guinond, a black activist in Brazil. (Guinond spoke with NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro for a fascinating look at an Afro-Brazilian religion called Candomblé.)
Joel Zito Araujo is a Brazilian filmmaker whose most recent work is a documentary called Raca, or Race.

"If you turn on the TV today and see a soap opera, you're going to see that blacks aren't even 10 percent of the actors. The people who are valued have Germanic features. If an actor has blond hair and blue eyes, he or she will be more successful. If the actor has black characteristics, she'll probably play a domestic worker, a marginal person," he told NPR's Melissa Block in a recent story looking at race in Brazil, one of the world's most ethnically diverse countries.

"As our best-known sociologist says, we are a society divided between the big house and the slave quarters," he said. "People who spent time in the kitchen were the black women."

But, but, according to Ra, TDK, and other posters, this is a uniquely American problem!

 

Psst. Do yourself a favor. Keep my screen name out of any & all of your future trolling ventures on this site from now on. Thank You.

 

,,,,,,,,,,,

 

nobody said it was uniquely and American problem.

 

Iran is the undesputed nose job capitol of the world...hands down...nobody even comes close.

Mexicans import blonde blue-eyed actors from Argentina to star in their novellas...

It's time for Black people to get off that "people of color" shit because it is wasted on the groups it's intended to include.