Jamaica | Bleached Skin, White Masks

A FORMER BRITISH COLONY of slave plantations, roughly 85 percent of Jamaica’s three million-strong population is of African origin. So when Vybz Kartel (born Adidja Palmer), the most popular DJ in Jamaica, released a song called ‘Cake Soap’, in which he appeared to be promoting a blue soap bar used to bleach white clothes as a skin-lightening agent, it didn’t go without notice. Just a few weeks later it was followed by a second song, ‘Coloring Book (Tattoo Time Come)’, in which the DJ bragged about women’s responses to the numerous tattoos decorating his newly bleached skin.

Gal a seh mi pretty like a coloring book

She seh mi skin pretty like a coloring book

Kartel was unabashed about displaying—even flaunting—his own considerably altered face, with an epidermis several shades lighter than his naturally dark skin. A tattoo fanatic, the DJ explained that his bleaching was motivated by a desire to exhibit the designs on his skin, making it “a living, breathing canvas” rather than a sign of low self-esteem or a desire to pass as white. He was a proud black man, he asserted, just as he had always been, and his decision to lighten his skin should be viewed in the same vein as a white person tanning theirs.

In March 2011 Kartel made his way to the University of the West Indies. His lyrics had been a popular choice of students when they were asked to select songs to analyse in a course on Reggae Poetry, and so he was invited to present a guest lecture. The university, however, found itself underprepared for the massive throng that descended onto the campus to catch the popular DJ’s words of wisdom. Taxi drivers, itinerant vendors, hair dressers, touts and walkabouts from all over the city descended upon the appointed spot, straining the university’s facilities to breaking point.

During the lecture, titled ‘Pretty as a Colouring Book: My Life and My Art’, Kartel, armed with a PowerPoint presentation, elaborated his position on the subject of skin bleaching:

I further maintain that bleaching today doesn’t mean the same as bleaching twenty-five years ago … we are a much prouder race who know that we can do what we want as far as style is concerned, we dictate styles and regard them as just that—styles. So as controversial as bleaching might be right now, I bask in my controversy with cake soap as my suntan.

Kartel’s university lecture unleashed another hurricane of protest and criticism, as well as a barrage of anti-bleaching songs from Jamaica’s voluble public sphere. Queen Ifrica, a popular reggae singer and DJ, put out a song called ‘Mi Nah Rub’ while DJ KipRich created a schoolyard craze with his humorous retort in his single, ‘Cyaan Get Brown (Cake Soap)’, that no matter how much cake soap is used, the fashionable brown complexion will remain unattainable to most:

But brown, you can’t get brown,

you coulda buy every cake soap dung a town

Brown you nah get brown all when a in a fab soap

you a drown

The most frequently expressed view by worried public commentators was that Kartel was disseminating harmful messages that might influence his fans to damage themselves with toxic skin-lightening substances. The other was that the DJ’s lyrics and actions represented a retrograde step in a hard-won battle for racial pride after centuries of enslavement and colonisation. “Should the Government of Jamaica ban bleaching products?” asked a writer in in the influential Kingston-based daily, The Gleaner.

An unapologetic Kartel responded by coopting the immortal words of Haile Selassie in a speech the Rastafari messiah made at the United Nations in 1963 about the battle of “good over evil” continuing “until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eye.” Kartel recalled this line, employed verbatim by Bob Marley in his song ‘War’. The public remained implacable. As one person tersely observed on Twitter, “Fight for our right to ... be pale. How strangely warped. Bob Marley must be turning in his grave.” Although Kartel’s evocation of Selassie’s eloquent antiracist statement to defend the lightening of his own skin may seem provocative, it is also a plea for a postracial framework that does not automatically align bleaching with low self-esteem or self-hatred.

Jamaican-born sociologist Fernando Henriques, in his 1953 book Family and Colour in Jamaica, noted the tendency to avoid discussions of race and colour in Jamaica:

To discuss such matters in a newspaper or in a public meeting at which all colours may be represented is to offend the Jamaican sense of propriety. Editorial policy regarding such matters appears to be not to give undue prominence to “racial” items. On the other hand, the activities of “society” people occupy an extremely prominent position in the daily papers. This means that the activities of white and fair people are reported at great length in the papers, the majority of whose readers are black. There seems to be no comment from any group on this anomaly.

Although the first part of his observation no longer holds true, judging by the vociferous public response to Kartel’s pro-bleaching statements, the second part remains virtually the same, with the society pages of today’s daily newspapers almost exclusively featuring the activities and events of the fairest in Jamaican society: the ruling elites in this former plantation society remain the light-skinned minority of the population.

The days of slavery, in which social death or invisibility was the fate of dark-skinned people, still haunt countries like Jamaica. In the 1970s, the Michael Manley government actively campaigned against black self-hatred, a residue of enslavement and colonisation. Self-love entailed accepting your physical attributes rather than attempting to alter black bodies to approximate Caucasian standards of beauty. ‘Black is beautiful’ was the slogan of the day as it was for African Americans fighting similar battles in the US. The key difference, however, was that whereas the latter are minorities in a predominantly white society, Afro-Jamaicans are the majority population in their country.

The fierce repudiation of Vybz Kartel’s stance on skin lightening is a sign that the lessons of the 1970s were well learnt by most Jamaicans, who are quick to identify bleaching as a sign of self-hatred. Researchers and academics, however, argue that Kartel is partly right and that in 21st-century Jamaica people bleach for a range of reasons, not all of them attributable to self-hatred or low self-esteem. For instance, even today employers consciously seek out light-skinned individuals, especially for jobs involving interaction with the public. Is it any wonder then that some individuals go to the extent of smothering their bodies in greasy creams and covering up in tracksuits to achieve lighter skin hues?

Others start early, going to school with the required ointments and periodically disappearing to the bathroom when it’s time to apply or rub another dose of the chemical preparation into their skins. Often parents and family members introduce youngsters to the practice even though the harsh chemicals used can produce severe health risks. In March last year a teenager describing herself as ‘confused’ consulted a teen advice column in the Jamaica Observer about the skin rash and eczema she was experiencing after using a bleaching cream her entire family was smearing itself with. On the advice of a doctor, she had stopped bleaching. “The rashes have stopped,” she wrote, “but I have dented the relationship with my mother and my boyfriend is just as displeased. What should I do?”

Christopher Charles, a social psychologist who has done research in the area, found that not all bleachers suffer from low self-esteem. Many youngsters, Charles said, view skin bleach as just another method of self-enhancement, like using Botox or liposuction to sculpt new bodies for themselves. One young woman from a Kingston ghetto who was taught to bleach by her older sister confessed that skin bleaching just made her feel special, like she was walking around under a spotlight: “It’s just the fashionable thing to do.”

It seems obvious that if Jamaicans want to eradicate the practice of skin lightening or bleaching they must first put an end to ‘colourism’—the tacitly accepted value system that provides those with white or light skin a much wider range of opportunities for social advancement. In a country with black track stars such as Usain Bolt, Veronica Campbell-Brown, Asafa Powell and famous dark-skinned musicians such as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Shabba Ranks and Buju Banton, there is no dearth of dark-skinned success stories, yet unless the structured privileges accorded to the light-skinned are systematically eradicated, bleaching is likely to continue.

Vybz Kartel is now behind bars, facing charges of murder and illegal possession of firearms. Is he being used as a whipping boy? Or what the Trinidadians call a bobolee—described by the West Indian Dictionary as a “stuffed effigy or representation of Judas [and nowadays unpopular public figures] which was tied by the neck and dragged through the streets on Good Friday”?

Whether Kartel is guilty as charged or not, one thing is for sure: focusing exclusively on the antics and lyrics of popular musicians is a superficial response to a problem that is more than skin deep.