Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing
Beauty = White: Photo Editing Software Edition
Posted: 20 Sep 2013 10:00 AM PDT
Here is something quite simple, sent along by Judy B. It’s a screenshot of Gimp, an open source image editing application. An optional plug-in, created by a user, offers a series of filters for images, including ones that “beautify.” One of the options is “skin whitening.”
This is one more reminder that we live in a racist society that conflates whiteness with beauty. Remember, too, though, that someone — very possibly a set of people — had to make a conscious decision to include skin whitening as an option and position it as a sub-category of beautification. Then they had to, literally, type the words into the program and make it so.
This shit doesn’t just happen. It’s not random. Racism isn’t just an ephemeral cultural thing. It involves actual decisions made by real people who, if not motivated by racism, are complicit with it.
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
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