BOB GARFIELD:  Days before Lupita Nyong’o won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, she addressed a gathering of black women in Hollywood.

  [CLIP]:

LUPITA NYONG’O:  I received a letter from a girl, and I’d like to share just a small part of it with you. “Dear Lupita,” it reads. “I think you're really lucky to be this black, but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin –

  [AUDIENCE RESPONSES]

- when you appeared on the world map and saved me.”

  [CONTINUED RESPONSES FROM AUDIENCE]

My heart bled a little when I read those words.

  [END CLIP]

Arun Venugopal is the host of Micropolis, a series he made for our producing station WNYC. This piece about the industry of skin whitening is called, “The Dark Side of Fair Skin.”

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  You may not know what Dencia’s Whitenicious cream is but millions of people do. Lupita went on to acknowledge her own childhood insecurity about having dark skin and how she overcame it. The speech went viral. It all cemented her legend, especially with young black women. just not this one.

  [CLIPS]:

DENCIA:  I don’t know her, I don’t know her story. Her story, that’s her personal life…

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Lupita’s antagonist, Dencia, is an African pop star. She launched Whitenicious.

DENCIA:  Whitenicious means, white means pure, but it doesn’t mean that white skin, but white in general, that’s how I look at it. It means pure. When you see a…

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Dencia claims her lightening cream is flying off the shelves, succeeding not only abroad but with African-Americans. To those who think she’s exploiting people’s deepest insecurities, she says people should have a choice. This is the latest chapter in a long story, says Nina Jablonski, the author of Living Color:  The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color.

NINA JABLONSKI:  Skin lighteners were created in reconstruction era United States by former slaves who wanted to have lighter skin that they considered to be more socially acceptable, that would allow them to get better jobs and not be discriminated against.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Even as late as the mid-20th century, skin lightening held a sort of science fiction appeal for some civil rights leaders. Walter White was the head of the NAACP and in 1949 he wrote, with great excitement, that a newly-discovered chemical, hydroquinone, could "hit the structure of society with the impact of an atomic bomb." Black people could pass as white.

It could, in fact, conquer the color line.

That's not how things worked out, but skin lighteners, which started out in the US, then moved into sub-Saharan Africa and into East and South Asia, it’s estimated that in the next four years, global sales of lighteners will hit $20 billion.

  [CLIP]:

WOMAN:  Oh it does have light beauty.

  [END CLIP]

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Jablonski figures that the country with the biggest skin color fixation is South Africa, but she put India in second place. And the other day I stepped into an Indian grocery store, Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights, where I met Dilshad Jiwani. She was just coming through the checkout with a bottle of Fair and Lovely. That’s India’s most famous skin lightener. In fact, the world’s top lightener, the company claims, used by one in ten women globally.

DILSHAD JIWANI:  My mom uses this for a long time. Now I’m using it. And my daughter uses it too.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  It’s a family tradition.

DILSHAD JIWANI:  Yeah.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Do you think you are treated differently or people look at you differently because you have –

DILSHAD JIWANI:  Yeah, that’s true. People look at you differently if your skin color is different, especially in America because they're fair and we have dark skin. So we are treated badly. So I want to be looking fair too.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  How do you think the treatment is different? I mean, how do you feel that they…

DILSHAD JIWANI:  Especially when in the train, if you’re sitting next to a white person, they just get up and sit somewhere else. It feels like insult! Since I’m white, they don’t do that.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  Oh, how sad. How sad, yeah. Well, you know, it’s the cross that you, you bear.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Carrie Mae Weems, a visual artist and MacArthur Genius whose retrospective is hanging right now at the Guggenheim.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  You know, I go to certain stores and I see African women buying skin-lightening creams, you know, really just butchering themselves, just destroying themselves because they're cheap creams, ultimately, with hydroquinone. I mean, I use it, you know, as a developing agent in, in - for photography, for Christ's sake’s, right? But that’s our issue, and we’ll have to figure out ways of getting through it.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  And that’s what Weems has spent her artistic life, in part, exploring.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  No one is ever simply black, not the jet-black blue boy who lives downstairs, right, or the high yellow girl who lives over there, or the – you know, the low brown boy. Playing with these ideas of, of color and then sort of taking it out, you know, moving from high yellow to golden yellow, to magenta color to violet that can be used as a discourse on almost the absurdity of color.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  I tell Carrie Mae in India the obsession with light skin is still pretty intense. Just read the matrimonial ads in a newspaper or on websites. It’s not at all unusual for people to advertise their fair skin, their daughter’s fair skin. Fair, wheatish, like –

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  Wheatish?

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Kind of like wheat, you’re only fair -

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  Like golden. [LAUGHS]

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  It’s like not as good as fair.

  [WEEMS LAUGHS]

But it’s not as bad as dusky.

NANDITA DAS:  Every article of mine begins with “dark and dusky. Earthy." You know, they have to kind of qualify.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Nandita Das is an Indian actress. She’s had a career mostly in art films, despite her dark skin. And lately she’s become the spokesperson for a campaign against skin lighteners.

  [AD SOUNDTRACK]

NANDITA DAS:  Every ad is telling you if you’re not fair, you can’t get a job, you can’t get a lover, you can’t get a husband. You only see white women in a country which is 90 percent dark; it’s bizarre to be having such a preference.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Dark is beautiful, India’s campaign, is a nod to the Black is Beautiful movement here in America, in the sixties and seventies.

  [[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

It isn’t unusual to hear darkness being celebrated, eroticized in American pop music - D'Angelo's "Brown Sugar," “Brown Skin Girl" by India Arie or Eric Benet's "Chocolate Legs."

  [ERIC BENÉT SINGING]:

Please, baby, wrap them chocolate legs `round me

Your cocoa skin against mine, babe

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  You can’t say the same about India or the rest of South Asia. The negative perceptions of dark skin are just so entrenched and they cut across caste and class.

  [INDIAN SINGER]:

Gori, gori, gori, gori….

As for music, there’s actually a word that comes up in countless  

Bollywood songs.

 [SINGER]: 

Gori, gori, gori, gori, gori, gori…

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  “Gori” meaning fair, a fair-skinned girl, a cutie, and in most of these movies that’s pretty accurate. She’s probably cute and she’s certainly really light. In India, Dark is Beautiful is gaining traction, but it has a long way to go before people, especially women, become comfortable in their own skin.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  I think we’re more open to the complexities and the diversities of blackness. The civil rights movement gave us that.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Carrie Mae Weems settled into her skin a long time ago.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  How can you do serious work when you're like, you know, stumbling around, trying to figure out whether or not I'm light or if I'm golden, if I’m yellow, if I’m red, if I’m – you know, what that means? I can't get anything done if I'm trying to second guess your ass on a regular basis about what you might feel when I walk in the room.

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD:  Arun Venugopal is a reporter for our producing station, WNYC. You can listen to more Micropolis at wnyc.org.

BOB GARFIELD:  Days before Lupita Nyong’o won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, she addressed a gathering of black women in Hollywood.

  [CLIP]:

LUPITA NYONG’O:  I received a letter from a girl, and I’d like to share just a small part of it with you. “Dear Lupita,” it reads. “I think you're really lucky to be this black, but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin –

  [AUDIENCE RESPONSES]

- when you appeared on the world map and saved me.”

  [CONTINUED RESPONSES FROM AUDIENCE]

My heart bled a little when I read those words.

  [END CLIP]

Arun Venugopal is the host of Micropolis, a series he made for our producing station WNYC. This piece about the industry of skin whitening is called, “The Dark Side of Fair Skin.”

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  You may not know what Dencia’s Whitenicious cream is but millions of people do. Lupita went on to acknowledge her own childhood insecurity about having dark skin and how she overcame it. The speech went viral. It all cemented her legend, especially with young black women. just not this one.

  [CLIPS]:

DENCIA:  I don’t know her, I don’t know her story. Her story, that’s her personal life…

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Lupita’s antagonist, Dencia, is an African pop star. She launched Whitenicious.

DENCIA:  Whitenicious means, white means pure, but it doesn’t mean that white skin, but white in general, that’s how I look at it. It means pure. When you see a…

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Dencia claims her lightening cream is flying off the shelves, succeeding not only abroad but with African-Americans. To those who think she’s exploiting people’s deepest insecurities, she says people should have a choice. This is the latest chapter in a long story, says Nina Jablonski, the author of Living Color:  The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color.

NINA JABLONSKI:  Skin lighteners were created in reconstruction era United States by former slaves who wanted to have lighter skin that they considered to be more socially acceptable, that would allow them to get better jobs and not be discriminated against.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Even as late as the mid-20th century, skin lightening held a sort of science fiction appeal for some civil rights leaders. Walter White was the head of the NAACP and in 1949 he wrote, with great excitement, that a newly-discovered chemical, hydroquinone, could "hit the structure of society with the impact of an atomic bomb." Black people could pass as white.

It could, in fact, conquer the color line.

That's not how things worked out, but skin lighteners, which started out in the US, then moved into sub-Saharan Africa and into East and South Asia, it’s estimated that in the next four years, global sales of lighteners will hit $20 billion.

  [CLIP]:

WOMAN:  Oh it does have light beauty.

  [END CLIP]

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Jablonski figures that the country with the biggest skin color fixation is South Africa, but she put India in second place. And the other day I stepped into an Indian grocery store, Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights, where I met Dilshad Jiwani. She was just coming through the checkout with a bottle of Fair and Lovely. That’s India’s most famous skin lightener. In fact, the world’s top lightener, the company claims, used by one in ten women globally.

DILSHAD JIWANI:  My mom uses this for a long time. Now I’m using it. And my daughter uses it too.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  It’s a family tradition.

DILSHAD JIWANI:  Yeah.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Do you think you are treated differently or people look at you differently because you have –

DILSHAD JIWANI:  Yeah, that’s true. People look at you differently if your skin color is different, especially in America because they're fair and we have dark skin. So we are treated badly. So I want to be looking fair too.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  How do you think the treatment is different? I mean, how do you feel that they…

DILSHAD JIWANI:  Especially when in the train, if you’re sitting next to a white person, they just get up and sit somewhere else. It feels like insult! Since I’m white, they don’t do that.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  Oh, how sad. How sad, yeah. Well, you know, it’s the cross that you, you bear.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Carrie Mae Weems, a visual artist and MacArthur Genius whose retrospective is hanging right now at the Guggenheim.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  You know, I go to certain stores and I see African women buying skin-lightening creams, you know, really just butchering themselves, just destroying themselves because they're cheap creams, ultimately, with hydroquinone. I mean, I use it, you know, as a developing agent in, in - for photography, for Christ's sake’s, right? But that’s our issue, and we’ll have to figure out ways of getting through it.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  And that’s what Weems has spent her artistic life, in part, exploring.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  No one is ever simply black, not the jet-black blue boy who lives downstairs, right, or the high yellow girl who lives over there, or the – you know, the low brown boy. Playing with these ideas of, of color and then sort of taking it out, you know, moving from high yellow to golden yellow, to magenta color to violet that can be used as a discourse on almost the absurdity of color.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  I tell Carrie Mae in India the obsession with light skin is still pretty intense. Just read the matrimonial ads in a newspaper or on websites. It’s not at all unusual for people to advertise their fair skin, their daughter’s fair skin. Fair, wheatish, like –

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  Wheatish?

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Kind of like wheat, you’re only fair -

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  Like golden. [LAUGHS]

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  It’s like not as good as fair.

  [WEEMS LAUGHS]

But it’s not as bad as dusky.

NANDITA DAS:  Every article of mine begins with “dark and dusky. Earthy." You know, they have to kind of qualify.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Nandita Das is an Indian actress. She’s had a career mostly in art films, despite her dark skin. And lately she’s become the spokesperson for a campaign against skin lighteners.

  [AD SOUNDTRACK]

NANDITA DAS:  Every ad is telling you if you’re not fair, you can’t get a job, you can’t get a lover, you can’t get a husband. You only see white women in a country which is 90 percent dark; it’s bizarre to be having such a preference.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Dark is beautiful, India’s campaign, is a nod to the Black is Beautiful movement here in America, in the sixties and seventies.

  [[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

It isn’t unusual to hear darkness being celebrated, eroticized in American pop music - D'Angelo's "Brown Sugar," “Brown Skin Girl" by India Arie or Eric Benet's "Chocolate Legs."

  [ERIC BENÉT SINGING]:

Please, baby, wrap them chocolate legs `round me

Your cocoa skin against mine, babe

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  You can’t say the same about India or the rest of South Asia. The negative perceptions of dark skin are just so entrenched and they cut across caste and class.

  [INDIAN SINGER]:

Gori, gori, gori, gori….

As for music, there’s actually a word that comes up in countless  

Bollywood songs.

 [SINGER]: 

Gori, gori, gori, gori, gori, gori…

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  “Gori” meaning fair, a fair-skinned girl, a cutie, and in most of these movies that’s pretty accurate. She’s probably cute and she’s certainly really light. In India, Dark is Beautiful is gaining traction, but it has a long way to go before people, especially women, become comfortable in their own skin.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  I think we’re more open to the complexities and the diversities of blackness. The civil rights movement gave us that.

ARUN VENUGOPAL:  Carrie Mae Weems settled into her skin a long time ago.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS:  How can you do serious work when you're like, you know, stumbling around, trying to figure out whether or not I'm light or if I'm golden, if I’m yellow, if I’m red, if I’m – you know, what that means? I can't get anything done if I'm trying to second guess your ass on a regular basis about what you might feel when I walk in the room.

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD:  Arun Venugopal is a reporter for our producing station, WNYC. You can listen to more Micropolis at wnyc.org.