The Well-Meaning Ethnocentrism of the Left

Don't ask me why, but I regularly receive email petitions from change.org, the left-wing activist organization which is listed in the dictionary as an antonym to the word "thoughtful".  Monitoring the organization's communiques, I believe, will give me advanced notice when liberal overreach means it's time to start running for the hills again.  But enough fun; I agree strongly with the vast majority of change.org's positions: immigrant rights, gay rights, the rights of animals, sustainable farming practices, environmental protection, ending the drug war, reducing America's prison population, etc. it's their methodology which I find repulsive: "activism". 

I remember in college, a certain liberal cultural anthropology professor wrote an editorial to the student newspaper bemoaning the lack of antiwar protestors and accordingly accusing the youth of the university of political apathy.  To be fair, there were definitely antiwar protestors at Duke, they were just universally hated for being obnoxious.  While I was actually trying to go to class and learn stuff so I could form a coherent opinion on stuff, activists formed a human chain Boy Meets World-style across the bus route, and we all had to get out and walk through the woods.  I was 30 minutes late for class, and it was something like econometrics where missing a small amount of lecture time translates to hours spent catching up late night in the social sciences building.

It is because a small number of bad apples have essentially ruined the political left that common sense measures such as environmental protection are seen as soft and opposed out of spite by practitioners of more austere political ideologies.  Meanwhile, moderates correctly perceive the insanity of both loud groups: the one in its beliefs and the other in its methods; as spokesperson for Generation X moderates also accused of apathy, Richard Linklater famously said (as if in response to a certain Duke cultural anthropology professor), "withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy."    

And so, I recently received a particularly disgusting email petition from change.org.  The meat:

This past week, Vaseline launched a controversial Facebook application that encouraged users to lighten the appearance of their skin. The application was targeted at users in India, who were asked to upload their profile photos and whiten their faces.

This isn't the first time Unilever -- which owns Vaseline -- has used less-than-discreet attempts to market the virtues of white skin in India. Back in 2008, the multinational began hawking a skin-whitening product called "White Beauty."

The difference now is that by using Facebook, Unilever has the potential to reach its more than 500 million users around the world, and spread its racially charged message that white is beautiful.

The skin whitening industry has taken off across India and other Asian countries, and creams are sold on shelves in black neighborhoods in the U.S. as well. The last thing we need is a tool on Facebook to extend this disturbing trend online.

While Unilever's application is offensive, it gives Facebook the opportunity to draw a line in the sand of what sort of applications it is willing to host, and what kind of values it hopes to advance. As the largest social network in the world, the company has an unprecedented opportunity to advance tolerance and understanding. Let's make sure it serves that purpose rather than serving as a platform for prejudice.

The many problems with change.org's approach:

(1) While I am not particularly certain about India, many countries outside the United States with large gradations of skin color value white skin for reasons having nothing to do with the forced enslavement of West Africans by European contractors from 600 to 200 years ago.  In Japan, where I live, white skin is valued for a variety of reasons, the most well-documented being that members of the aristocracy tended historically to avoid laboring outside.  White skin is still valued because it connoted wealth, which - along with health - is more or less the basis for all attraction.  This is also true in China, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, and I would imagine the vast swath of land between to have a similar custom. 

On the contrary, in European countries, darker skin is valued, probably for reasons also related to both wealth and health.  Skin cancer and vitamin-D deficiency respectively historically killed enough human beings before they passed on their genes to select for an extremely wide and nuanced range of human skin tones to fit the earth's many climates.  In places where European skins do not fit levels of exposure to direct sunlight - such as in the United States and Australia - darker skin is valued.  Those of us who have read or seen American Psycho (and those of us who have not) should be well-aware of the great lengths to which the American beorgeoisie will go to give themselves wrinkle and melanoma-inducing tans for seemingly biological reasons.

(2) Outside of the United States, the idea that "white is beautiful" is not "racially charged".  The directors of change.org make the same mistake as the activists in The Cove by forcing conditions and ideas fermented in the pickle jar of American history on distant and disparate civilizations.  It would behoove the activist community to develop an imagination and do some more thinking before acting, maybe even becoming "thinkivists".   

(3) Inside the United States on the other hand, there is a long-standing tradition of glorifying whiteness that does directly relate to the legacies of slavery, but even here we don't ostracize the goth kids who hang out at the malls (well, maybe we do a little, but for reasons unrelated to race).  By not fairly inculcating members of the goth subculture as well, change.org seems to be implying that choice is okay for Americans, because most of us make the "right choice", but when it comes to other countries, people should not be free to choose whether to whiten their skin or whether to eat dolphin, because those are the "wrong choices".  Don't those Indians know about the evils of slavery!?

(4) I am no friend of massive corporations, but blaming Facebook for everything and anything needs to stop.  At Duke there was a particularly odious gang of unthinking activists called Duke Divest whose loudest initiative consisted of lobbying the administration to stop investing the Duke endowment in Caterpillar, Inc. because Caterpillar, Inc. apparently contracted with the Israeli government, and the Israeli government apparently used Caterpillar, Inc.'s bulldozers to bulldoze the homes of Palestinians.  This sort of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon morality tends to manifest underlying anticorporate political biases more than expose corporate malfeasance.  One night in college, a few friends and I got into an argument with a Duke Divest member on whether or not the university should also divest from Gatorade because Gatorade provides the electrolytes that Sudanese soldiers metabolize when they mercilessly slaughter puppies in Darfur.  She vascillated, and we eventually got bored. 

If Facebook chooses to pull Unilever's skin-whitener advertisement at the behest of change.org, the only "kind of values" it will advance are those of American cultural imperialism, where every thing is the same as it is in America, noble savages need to be given Christian names, and they need to be taught how to make proper choices, and inside every misguided Indian teenage girl who wants to whiten her skin to look like a princess is an all-American, tanning-salon-orange, Tool Academy skank trying to get out.