South Asian family members with darker skin stigmatised: UK study

London: Black people and those of South Asian heritage with darker skin shades can be the subject of prejudice and insults from members of their families, a UK academic research has found.

The joint study, which claims to be the first substantive research into the issue in the UK, found that family members with darker skin were sometimes stigmatised by their parents, siblings and other relatives.

Dr Aisha Phoenix, of King’s College London, and Dr Nadia Craddock, of the University of the West of England, interviewed 33 people aged 19-60, including doctors, social workers, students, civil servants, an accountant and a train driver.

They had aimed to study the way that people of colour face more discrimination if they have darker skin and features that are further from those associated with white people. But the unexpected finding of their work was the extent of skin shade prejudice from family members, with almost half of those interviewed saying they had witnessed it or been the target.

"Families play a central role in shaping ideas about skin shade. Within families children with light skin were often favoured, while those with dark skin were stigmatised and subjected to insults and bullying," Dr Phoenix told the British Sociological Association’s annual conference in Manchester last week.

"People of colour with dark skin can be subjected to prejudice and discrimination from both members of their own families and society at large. The internalised colourism within some families contributes to the prejudice. However, some families resist colourism and work to instil positive ideas about dark skin or all skin shades,” said Pheonix, Lecturer in Social Justice, School of Education, Communication & Society, King’s College London.

Her report documented experiences of South Asian heritage people and those from the black communities.

"I have a few friends who are dark-skinned and Asian and they attribute as one of the reasons they’re not married to their skin colour because the traditional way of arranged marriages is your mum would get a call from the groom's mum and one of the first questions they ask is ‘What is your daughter’s skin colour?’" a 31-year-old South Asian woman told the study.

A 43-year-old South Asian woman shared: "Being younger, one of the biggest issues I had was with my mum always going on about how it’s better to be fairer, ‘you’ll only find a boy if you’re fairer and you’re only beautiful if you’re fair’. And I think that really got to me. How do you interpret that when you’re a young child?" A 51-year-old black woman told Phoenix: “Even my father, I remember saying to me once when I was about 13 that I was black and ugly like my grandmother." Phoenix told the conference on April 12 that some families reproduced prejudices common in wider society, so that “darker skin was imbued with negativity”.

The study's interviewees’ ethnicities covered 11 Black Caribbean, 11 Mixed Race, six Black African, four South Asian and one Chinese. The research was conducted from January to June 2019 and is part of the UK Skin Shade study.