"the great shift"

I did always want to be beautiful,

The internet brings forth a new phenomenon every week. This one struck me. I don’t think it’s even really reached the mainstream yet, it seems to live in the comment sections of beautiful people. And I find it rather cruel, rather taunting.

I’d just finished writing my final essay for my gender class on the femininity of South Asian women and how it’s constructed in a Western setting. It was the most exciting thing I’ve gotten to research, and yet I didn’t even manage to hand the full thing in. There’s a lot of myself on that word doc that now feels rather fruitless. Regardless, I wrote about perception and portrayal and otherness; and the struggle of not really being allowed to be feminine, to be beautiful. Whilst my main focus was on the hybridity of the intersectional diasporic woman and her navigation in a world that says it does not belong to her, I sought to explore more on physical attraction and vanity, to be able to express the existence of subconscious prejudices within romance.

‘The great shift’ should be a positive thing. It seems to want me to clink two glasses of champagne and express my gratitude to the stars. Because “Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to be considered pretty!!! Oh, how I owe you.” The entire premise of this internet-coined concept is the decision that a race has suddenly become attractive. As though a viable option for dating that appeared from no former background.

While this might be the first time I’ve heard the use of the term, this is certainly not the first instance. Black men became seen as attractive, and unfortunately fetishized, in the media in the 2000s, and Black women in around 2020 [@zinaaweenaa called this the ethereal Black Woman movement]. It’s a notion suggesting that perhaps minorities could be considered real people with real value; only to be reduced to offering some form of pleasant physical appearance. And it is this appearance if considered pretty, that is their value. No, it’s not validating.

For years, I watched brown women be belittled in the media. I took that and made it part of me as well. For years, Western television never once offered the space for brown people to be perceived as attractive, as something to be wanted. Most 2000s representation were men, Baljeet in Phineas & Ferb, Raj in The Big Bang Theory, and Ravi in Jessie, who were all forced to be this flanderised figure of pitiful nerds. Then there was Kelly Kapoor in The Office who hated her culture as much as herself. Cece from New Girl was pretty important to me, interesting once they removed this whole idea of her being exotic. Then came 2020 and there felt like a real influx of South Asian women allowed to be beautiful - Kate and Edwina Sharma, Devi Vishwakumar, Inej Ghafa. It was promising.

I thought the idea of a ‘great shift’ really was a positive thing at first too. Far too many diary entries and birthday candles documented me wishing for beauty, just a little bit. What a privilege it would be to ever be considered pretty. And so, initially, that little girl in me was thinking maybe all those candles worked after all. But the sudden praising and uplifting of minorities is never exclusively good. Instead, it reinforces an external need for approval - brown people are only now allowed to be attractive because white people on the internet have decreed it so. No one looks any different, brown people, and other minorities, have always looked this way and have always been beautiful. Society was just socialized in such a way that no one believed it.

Racial preferences are always a strange matter to discuss. Can that really be true? Doesn’t attraction compose itself beyond a physical basis? ‘Tastes’ and ‘types’ too are a subtly exclusionary practice that appeared justified. No one can be blamed for having them though, they are products of the world not of people. Amia Srinivasan (in Does anyone have the right to sex?) raises criticism for desire in that preference is essentially a discriminator, a psychological construction. She reaches the conclusion that there is a duty to transfigure such socialized desires.

This ‘great shift’ is leading to the glorification of specific features of South Asian women. Not all, only some. And likely those with more eurocentric features, for the cycle will not end. It is not the validation that the first glance of the term convinces you it is. It is a twisted sort of decree that declares that you never have been beautiful but maybe you could be now.

I consider the brown women I know as some of the most beautiful people in the world. They always have been.

from the graveyard of my mind.