Submitted by Pfeffer_Prinz t3_126sj3j in todayilearned
Nowadays the poor work inside "9 to 5" (if lucky), and the rich are tanned from doing nothing on the beach.
Yeah the reverence for lily white skin back in those days had nothing to do with white supremacy and everything to do with the status symbol of not having to work outside. You'll hear "lily white skin" referenced a lot in old English folk songs to describe the beauty of a woman, and while that's problematic to today's audiences for obvious reasons, it had no racist connotations back in the day.
Maybe in the developed world. In most of the developing/under developed world, some of the lowest paying jobs involve working outside (like manual laborers).
Today somebody learned that Coco Chanel was an enthusiastic Nazi collaborator.
Did she accidentally bang nazis too?
Another fun fact - she was also a Nazi.
It’s funny how everyone flip flopped, in many places it’s desirable to have lighter skin yet white people are walking around looking like Oompa Loompas.
No, she purposefully banged them. She was a nazi sympathizer at best, collaborator at worst.
[deleted]
There's even a caste system is some parts.
You're so wrong, lol. Things can be both classist AND racist.
"Light skin = desirable" might have been "not racist" for folks with naturally light skin, but what about people of color back then? Do you really believe that the elite white folks of the time would've described dark/brown/black skin as beautiful or desirable?
The racism is baked into the statement. It sets light skin as desirable, natural, wealthy, classy. It sets "light skin" as the norm or the default. You honestly don't see any racism in that?
White supremacy is insidious as fuck.
Oh yeah? Then why have I heard so many WWI stories where doctors recommended injured people to get more sunlight?
There can be an overlap without "not wanting to get burned" as a status symbol - yes.
But it's also true that there was very likely a preference for white people. Both can be true - preferring non-burned skin can 100% not be racist. In other words, am I a racist for not liking people that intentionally get super dark tans and look fried? Or, do I happen to prefer healthy-looking skin (and healthy habits)? Now, understand that society was 90% white and it follows that 90% of preferences and word choices are white-leaning. That also doesn't make someone racist.
Let's change words a bit. Songs in India reference Hinduism and not Christianity. Do you then conclude that Indians hate all Christians and their songs/poems are rooted in bigotry? Or do you concede that lack of access and awareness does not equal hate?
I understand and applaud your efforts for a better world, but your claims and approach do more damage than good - especially as it pertains to DEI and CRT. This last part is especially true since England under Elizabeth was probably one of the more liberal thinking cultures at the time and it's well documented that it was not uncommon at all for interracial marriages. Doesn't mean it was great, but you are showing your (American?) bias in thinking 1800s England was the same as 1800s America.
Well this is bollocks!
Oh stop it. You're talking about a time when the vast majority of people in the UK hadn't even seen a black person. There was no racial element whatsover, it was 100% class.
Horrible Fact: Coco Chanel was also a Nazi collaborator
That hasn't changed, there are parts of Asian where pale skin is idolized.
Yes, comparing modern day ethics to older eras where racism wasn't even a conscious factor is stupid.
You can be racist to a group without being exposed to them
>the reverence for lily white skin back in those days had nothing to do with white supremacy
i dont think white supremacists of the era would have agreed with that tbh
Keep grasping at straws. The preference for pale white skin back in those days as an indicator of class had nothing whatsoever to do with race.
That's not very fun.
Which white supremacists of the era? We're talking about ordinary European people who had never even seen a black person let alone mixed with them. Pale white skin then was seen as an indicator of having been wealthy enough to stay indoors instead of working in the sun, and that's all there is to it. Race wasn't even an issue among common people in the UK until the immigration of West Indians, Africans, Indians and Pakistanis in the 20th century.
Just wait till you hear her WWII stories. Bitch was a collaborator.
Duh, because it was still for poor people at the time.
>We're talking about ordinary European people who had never even seen a black person let alone mixed with them
nah - what you said was
>Yeah the reverence for lily white skin back in those days had nothing to do with white supremacy
but the two concepts are intrinsically linked - reverence for lily white skin back in those days was intrinsically associated with white supremacy in every place where white supremacy existed
not to mention the fact that the reverence for lily white skin furthered white supremacy in places where it didnt have a strong foothold
now if you had said that the concepts existed separately from each other that would have been closer to true - but still debateable
>Race wasn't even an issue among common people in the UK until the immigration of West Indians, Africans, Indians and Pakistanis in the 20th century.
youre right there - its not like anybody in europe ever heard of the dark skinned moors that invaded christendom in the 7th century despite being mentioned in half the novels of the era
Vitamin D provided by exposure to sunlight is one of the best things.
Othello was written in 1603 and is definitely about race. Sure, it's also about class and religion and a lot of other things, but race is definitely a major part of the play. How would Shakespeare have been able to write about race if it wasn't a component in English society at the time?
Wrote this in response to another comment, but it fits here too:
Othello was written in 1603 and is definitely about race. Sure, it's also about class and religion and a lot of other things, but race is definitely a major part of the play. How would Shakespeare have been able to write about race if it wasn't a component in English society at the time?
When I was stationed in the West Indies one of the female officers tried desperately to get a tan, because she was going home for xmas. Six hours a day three days a week, nothing. No tan, no burn, nothing.
Well there's also some sense to it. Vitamin D deficiency is a persistent issue in the UK and Ireland, and isn't conducive to an ideal healthy status.
You really think black people didn’t exist in Europe in the 1800s or before? You think a European in the 1920s wouldn’t have seen a black person?
You can’t actually be that dense.
how many times do posts for this sub come from people listening to Robert Evans
You think because the civil rights movement hadn’t happened yet racism didn’t exist?
I’m literally in the middle of part 2 and thought “I haven’t hit that part yet!” lol
[deleted]
>but the two concepts are intrinsically linked - reverence for lily white skin back in those days was intrinsically associated with white supremacy in every place where white supremacy existed
No it wasn't, it was intrinsically linked to pale skin being seen as a status symbol given that rich and privileged people had the palest skin through non exposure to the sun, as I've explained before. White supremacy was not a concept in the minds of ordinary people at that time, as much as you wish it were.
>not to mention the fact that the reverence for lily white skin furthered white supremacy in places where it didnt have a strong foothold
It might well have done, yes. But white supremacy wouldn't gain any kind of foothold among ordinary white people until they started mixing with non white people and developing ignorant (and sometimes superstitious) ideas about them.
>now if you had said that the concepts existed separately from each other that would have been closer to true - but still debateabl
Well they did, because the admiration of pale skin back then was a way for ordinary white people to discriminate against each other, not other races.
>youre right there - its not like anybody in europe ever heard of the dark skinned moors that invaded christendom in the 7th century despite being mentioned in half the novels of the era
This doesn't mean that ordinary people in the UK had mixed with black people to form ideas of racial superiority, no. Again, it was all about class.
Back in those days, very few people outside of London had seen a black person. Shakespeare was not of the ordinary British working classes. He was writing about a concept that was not a part of the vast majority of British people's lives. It was an "exotic" subject which didn't reflect the lives of ordinary Brits in any way.
>White supremacy was not a concept in the minds of ordinary people at that time, as much as you wish it were.
in the 1920s? half a century after the american civil war? ten years before the aryan supremacist nazis took power in germany? the decade AFTER 'racist' was included in the oxford english dictionary?
i gotta say bruv despite your confidence i am getting the impression that your understanding of history is quite unburdened by the facts of history
Yes, the concept of racism is a belief, an idea.
Unless you are a nazi lol
You’re really going to argue people in the 1920s weren’t racist? While the KKK was running around?
Yes they existed. But not in great number and usually limited to large metropolises. English people outside of London had not mixed with black people, no. And we're not talking about the 1920's here. We're talking pre 1800's. Stop calling people dense when you have no idea what you're talking about.
i think theres a limit to the practical utility of reasoning with a person who refuses to recognize that the literal concept of 'white=better' is intrinsically associated with white supremacy
but i guess theres merit in the entertainment value of it
Just because they hadn’t seen them doesn’t mean they didn’t know about it. Skin color was used as justification for colonialism (white mans burden).
But this isn't the reason for the preference of lily white Caucasian skin over tanned Caucasian skin, which is what we're talking about here. You'll note that white supremacists don't give a shit whether or not a white person has a tan or not. Just that they're Caucasian.
Even in many countries were almost everyone is black or brown lighter skin tends to be preferred.
I once saw some theory that because women in average tend to have lighter skin than men of the same race that was associated with femininity by many civilizations. Richer men would then marry women with lighter skin. Give it a few generations, and there would always be an elite / aristocracy with lighter skin than the plebeians, regardless of the main race of the population.
His plays were immensely popular with "ordinary Brits" though, so I do think there was something they could connect with. Even if they didn't interact with black people, they'd interact with people other "races" fairly often -- be they Irish, Greek, Arab, or whatever. And they were certainly willing to be highly prejudiced against those groups -- some of whom are known to be "swarthier" than the inhabitants of the UK.
It's a vastly different interaction with race than the modern day one, of course. Othello is as much about Othello being from a population that tends to be Muslim as it is about his having dark skin or African features. That's not as present a concern with modern day racism (although it does still crop up a bit).
I don't think your point is entirely unfair, but I do think it's overstated and a bit too focused on racism being against Africans specifically -- people of color is a broader term and was the one OP was using. Also, the current trend is to view racism as something that doesn't need to be intentional -- evaluated on it's impact instead of it's intent, I think it's easy to say the phrase "lily white skin" being an ideal of beauty is a definition that inherently leaves some races out. Unfortunately, the current trend also seems to be to view these instances of unintentional racism as as evil as targeted and malicious racism. Which is, frankly, crazy. We should be able to recognize something as harmful and learn to avoid it in the future without needing to assign malice to actions that had none.
It's not called a tan when is the natural color of the skin, but "latins" can get a tan and is called a tan.
I think you are the one with some weird ideas.
Anyone who unironically says 'latinx' isn't quite in sync with the real world...
A few years ago I developed a rash called Pityriasis Rosea and the dermatologist told me there's really no treatment except to go outside and lay in the sun to help it go away faster...never thought I'd hear a dermatologist tell me to basically get a tan!
“Latinx” lmao
It's still largely true.
But what's odd is when light skinned Asians get racist on other poorer Asians for dark skin and forget that they also get as dark under the sun.
[removed]
You think racism ended with slavery?
There are caste systems in most of the world, even America and the EU
[deleted]
She was also a Nazi sympathizer.
Do not compare America's classism with an actual caste system. They are different animals.
It's not racist, it's colorism
It's not intrinsically associated at all, colorism has always existed even inside ethnically homogenous societies.
Because of Niels Ryberg Finsen, who began studying the effect of sunlight on health around the 1890's.
Coco Chanel might have helped popularize it, but it was already underway
I was the only non-Korean on a tour bus once. We were taking it through the he countryside to a shrine. As soon as the big group got on, all the curtains were closed the bus was completely dark, and I could not see outside.
What's odd is when light skinned humans get racist on other humans for dark skin and forget that they would also get as dark under the sun after a few evolutionary cycles.
i dont know if i can dumb this down for you any more but - if you have two things? and one is a subset of the other? THAT IS AN INTRINSIC ASSOCIATION
if there was no 'colorism' there would be no white supremacy - colorism is THE intrinsic and inextractible quality of white supremacy that distinguishes it from other ethnic discrimination
Between the Nazi stuff and the skin cancer, she’s really one of the great unsung monsters of the 20th century.
[deleted]
But that isn't what white supremacy is, you idiot.
White supremacy is a racial belief system, it has nothing to do with variation in pigment WITHIN an ethnic group and honestly not inextricably linked with pigment at all, considering the anglo Saxon white supremacists targeted the Irish (whiter than them) as an inferior race.
If one brother becomes a merchant and works inside all day while another becomes a poor farmer, they're not looking down on the farmer because of his color, they are looking down on him because he is a farmer, and the color just outs him as one. They're the same "white race"
This is the fun bit about that: she tried to dupe the Jewish director out of Parfums Chanel by trying to claim sole ownership during WWII when Jews were basically not allowed to own anything. But the Wertheimers were savvy enough to have already transferred ownership to a Christian ally. After the war it was all transferred back to the Wertheimers. The family still owns the company.
There’s nothing healthy about a tan. The sun is no joke. It will fucking kill you. Everyone carries on about the spiders and snakes in Australia but the sun is the number 1 killer here.
This is a simplification. Pretty silly. She was part of a trend among Western societies, but she alone didn’t cause the shift.
Now 100 million people owe you a debt of gratitude for the skin cancer theycurrently have, thanks a bunch
The nazi spy / sympathizer?
It's classism.
Maybe it’s Maybelline
/r/tanlines if you want to do some research on this phenomenon NSFW
That's true in Japan and Korea, but it's not true everywhere. In India and some other South(east) Asian countries, there's more than one ethnicity, and some of them different in their typical skin color. I don't know why people from the US think dark-skinned places only have a single ethnicity.
COCO CHANEL IS A NAZI
Little more than just the though
... I know?
Different ethnic groups aren't really different "races" either though.
Wikipedia picked the perfect example for drawing a user’s attention to tanlines
If you want to be pedantic, there's no such thing as "race" in the first place. It isn't a scientific concept, can't be defined, and can't be tested.
Ethnicity is a real thing though, and in places like India, you have (for example) dark-skinned Dravidians in parts of the country and then light-skinned Aryan-descended people in the north.
These are people with historically different cultures who mostly stayed within their ethnicity, leading to them having stereotypically different skin colors -- what we could call "race" in the US.
>But that isn't what white supremacy is, you idiot.
ah yes forgive me for being such an idiot to have developed the misconception that white supremacy was somehow related to skin colour 🤡
>considering the anglo Saxon white supremacists targeted the Irish
really? tell me professor history 🤡 how long did that last 🤡🤡
seems in retrospect there may have been some quality the irish had that inhibited the persistency of that categorism
too bad its nothing obvious 🤡
I know, that's why I put race in quotations. There are plenty of ethnic groups in Europe that can be visually told apart, no one considers them different races.
Happens in the US among Blacks, especially in New Orleans. I was in a sociology class in college and a light-skinned Black classmate from New Orleans said that her mom would get mad if she went to the beach because she would ruin all their family’s hard work over the years to get light. All our jaws were on the floor.
And apocryphally, there used to be street parties in certain Creole neighborhoods in New Orleans where they’d tack a paper bag up to a tree and if your skin wasn’t at least as light as the bag, you couldn’t stay.
So you are stupid? Because that distinction was made since race was a concept.
Didn't she suck Nazi dick when they occupied Paris.
Buying body wash here in SE Asia is tough because almost every single one is skin whitening. It takes a while to read all the labels and finally find one that’s not whitening.
I don't know who that is! I was actually reading an article about how in the 1800s, tuberculosis symptoms were attractive in high society (making you frighteningly skinny, with skin so pale it was translucent, and rosy cheeks from constant fever). Even after they got over the epidemic, the beauty standards stuck around... until Chanel's suntan
>They are different animals.
Literally
In a thick German accent
"Ooo, Oberstleutnant Graf---Who are you wearing? You smell positively anti-semitic."
actually i seem to recall a certain someone talking about the aryan race
I just listened to both episodes today at work, and I don’t remember this being mentioned.
No-one should ever feel the 'need' to either lighten OR darken their skin. It's ridiculous
the beauty industry is flooded with "whitening" potions and shit
Which doesn't really exist as he imagined it at all.
Dude it's literally Hitler, no one got into that shit as much as him and his ilk. The average European did not give it the much thought.
That’s me!!
White man's burden was an 1800s thing. He's right, many European people prior to the 1700s probably never saw a black person in their life. People rarely traveled beyond their local villages.
The empire already existed in the 1700s…
he brought accuracy to an -ism fight
obviously 🤡
Same here! It's weird how the internet syncs up like this at times!
Feminist, nazi icon, Coco Chanel.
That’s why the beauty standard is say LA is to be tan but in China is to be white.
Interesting, always wondered why guys with the same parents oftentimes are darker than their sisters
I really don’t believe this. I come for a country with 300+ days of scorching heat. Everyone is fit and healthy and has great skin. Unlike where I live now in the UK - depression, fatigue and accelerated aging are so common.
Skin cancer is the number 1 killer in Australia
[removed]
...okay?
Is a Nazi lol even worse than a regular lol?
yeah people don't know about the Creole community in New Orleans — historically they were a separate class from Black and white, sort of in between the two on the social ladder. White people didn't treat them as equals, since they were definitely POC, but they were treated wayyy better than Black folks.
Their ancestry wasn't just African, it was also French & Spanish (and Indigenous). This gave them lighter skin & hair, but also access to generational wealth (and a sense of privilege). So they owned lots of property & businesses, held political offices, had functioning schools, hobknobbed with white society, and filled large neighborhoods. They were a solid middle/upper class for a long time.
So they saw themselves as distinct from the Black community, who were largely descended from enslaved Africans (so they were dark-skinned & poor). Creoles, like any people with privilege, generally shat on the class(es) below them. As James Baldwin said, that's "the price of the ticket" if you want to join the upper classes.
(ofc there are exceptions. Many Creoles treated people below them with respect & solidarity)
New Orleans Creoles still exist, of course, but not as a separate class like they used to be. They've been absorbed by both the larger Black and the larger white communities, but that wasn't so long ago — many people alive today were born into a distinct Creole class. Many of the prominent Creole families are still around today, and hold lots of sway.
(source: lived in New Orleans half my life)
EDIT: I'm not talking about the general Creole people, but the specific Creoles of color in New Orleans. Outside the city, the word "Creole" means something different
Did coco Chanel shit on your head?
I love that man!
A smelly Nazi.
Wow thats. Now I know if I ever need to buy soap in parts of Asia to do some research about the brands lol.
Not so sure of that. Skin cancer is not likely to kill you before you can breed. The mutations that give me white skin and blue eyes are not going to just breed out. I would need to mutate a melanin gene back or breed it in.
yup.... and it IS shit! people should enjoy and be proud of whatever hue their skin (or anyone else's) is! 👍👏❤️
You are making an argument that discriminating based on ethnicity instead of race isnt racism than proceed to say that races dont exist, while also ignoring the fact that literally all of europe has hated jews pretty much since they existed until the end of ww2, and anti semitism was very fashionable during that era anywhere in europe...
What exactly is your point even?
I’d be rolling in the money then because I can make nurses concerned with how noticeably pale I always am.
Thank you Coco
Yet again, everything shit in the world has to be compared to America
In Bollywood movies, they put lighter skinned actors in front and darker skins one in the back, it's pretty disgusting once you notice it.
Source: Wife is South Asian
That's because you don't have an ozone layer, and most of your population are the wrong phenotype for that climate anyway
A moderate sun exposition is absolutely necessary
[removed]
Back in the day, the rich ate and the poor went hungry, so skinny people were looked down on and fatter people were treated as royalty. My how fads and trends change
She also had Nazis as lovers during WWII.
[deleted]
[deleted]
You’re telling me a Nazi is responsible for skin cancer????
Or what's more likely is Coco lied to make herself look better like all those fashion poseurs do.
Skin colors being based on different ethnicities is immaterial to the post, unless you have examples of cases where the people of lighter skinned ethnicities do not look down upon the people with darker skin because of their color. I would bet that an Aryan Indian parent would prefer their child marry another lighter-skinned Indian than a darker skinned one, even if it's normal for that ethnicity to be darker
West Africa, too. Every other billboard is a skin bleaching product
It’s not simply sunlight; Australasia has a combination relatively high UV light levels, clear skies, and a high proportion of people with pale skin compared to other sunny parts of the world (more here). Especially in summer and unlike the UK a pale person like me can easily burn in the sun in as little as ten or fifteen minutes- you can actually feel it start to happen as soon as you step outside.
You’d be surprised that white people, just like black people, judge other white people if their skin is too white. I’m not sure about Asians and other colors but I can tell you racism exists even among people of the same color. You’re too white, too dark, etc.
> get as dark under the sun after a few evolutionary cycles
Roughly 100 generations is the quickest it can happen.
That's 2500 years.
For context, in 500BC the global population was 100 million, the iron age had not yet started, none of the Abrahamic religions would exist for another 4 centuries, Rome had just become a republic but was still just a random unimportant little city, Buddha was born and Pythagoras discovered how to talk about triangles.
Race is not a meaningful category in a scientific sense but it certainly exists in people's minds as its own category that comes with its own set of prejudices.
You can have an abused ethnic group within a majority race, case in point, Jews suffer from anti semitism but they would've been allowed to drink from white only water fountains because they were perceived as white.
It's really not that complicated, I don't understand your confusion to be honest.
Doesn't make top 10.
Ischaemic heart diseases
Dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease
Cerebrovascular diseases (e.g. stroke)
Lung cancer
Chronic lower respiratory diseases
Much like the rest of the world, it's lifestyle diseases and being overweight.
Skin cancer kills about 2000 Australians a year. It's not even in the top 5 cancers for deaths! For context, about 5500 die a year from colon cancer. Or pulling numbers from their arse, much like your statistic.
That's less time than I thought.
[removed]
you must be fun at parties. all your friends love having you around
Im not sure if there ever were "white only" water fountains in europe. Just because one ethnic group is discriminated against less than another one, doesnt mean one is considered a "race" and the other an "ethnicity". You are just coming up with random definitions on the spot to suit your narrative and i am quite confused about what that narrative is even supposed to be, especially since you use race and ethnicity interchangeably in other comments and suddenly make a distinction here.
Which is similar to the Coloureds of South Africa who are still separated from Whites and Blacks to this day.
At no point did I ever use race and ethnicity interchangeably. And the water fountain is called an example. Another example, after the Spanish reconquest, Jews and Arabs were exiled from Spain. Jews were allowed to stay if they converted to Christianity, but Arabs were not allowed regardless of their religion.
Ive been clear enough, you're being willfully ignorant if you can't understand these simple concepts.
Coco Chanel's estate suedy Little Pony over a character named Coco Pommel saying it hurt the brand. Coco Chanel collaborated with Mazis
"prior to the 1700s"
Oh yeah I’m not white
And don’t you guys have a whole in the ozone layer
I used to work with a Korean guy as a landscaper and he always wore long sleeves, we asked why and he said “so my friends don’t think I’m poor”
Maybe in the US, not everywhere. A 9 to 5 in an office is a privileged job in third world countries
Have you ever left your room?
OldMork t1_jeaohz8 wrote
still today in some parts of asia pale skin = rich because dont have to work outside.