Travel via road and you’ll find plenty of corrugated shacks where underprivileged families live all cooped up inside one small space. They try to make ends meet by becoming migrant workers or selling roses, sliced coconuts, posters, pens, pop fiction, and whatnot on the road as the red light halts all traffic. While they’re trying to make a life amidst their challenges, it’s not okay to churn some frivolous Instagram content out of their struggles. What’s also not okay is to paint oneself dark to fake poverty.
Apparently, an Instagram influencer has been painting herself dark, selling roses on the streets, and acting as a poor person. What’s more problematic is not many people had been finding it worrisome. A Twitter user, Rutuja, has called it out.
When did dark skin become an indicator of poverty? People worldwide have been fighting against superficial beauty standards that associate success and failure, wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness under the brackets of white and black. Deliberately darkening the skin color for some random reel (with a massive audience applauding the content) reflects society’s collective failure in the fight against these baseless standards.
Here’s how people are reacting to it.
When schools teach shiz like ‘dark skin is ugly and white skin is beautiful,’ can we even blame adults for reinforcing similar stereotypes! (Not a question)
Also Read: 10 Times Indian Textbooks Were So Regressive It Made Us Wonder How They Even Got Approved
