To judge not by the color of one's skin, but by the content of one's... fashion?

I was walking over to Kim, Stanton, and Rachel’s indecently posh apartment the other day, and for some reason I started paying attention to the clothes of the people who were passing by me on the street. Now, as someone who nowadays wears free T shirts (mostly Pton Prerade ’10 or ’09), I was in no position to judge style or fashion, but I did start to notice color.

I should probably preface this by saying that there’s a surprising (and sometimes refreshing) frankness to the talk of race in South Africa. The tentative, “Should I say black or African-American? To what extent is it okay to make jokes about Asian-Americans if I am one myself? What about the cultural and familial reasons for XYZ socioeconomic disparities”— types of questions that we dance around in the States— are openly declared, debated, dissected, and disseminated here, sometimes haphazardly and with questionable substantiation, and at other times with a direct honesty that’s necessary to bring to the table.

So we begin with the premise that certain colors match better with certain skin tones. I just did a simple search on Google, and it turns out that people’s skin tones (and their undertones) can be divided into four seasons (in the sense of spring summer autumn winter), and that each “season” of skin tone carries accompanying undertones of skin and overtones of emotions.

Now, the pleasant topics of oppression and racial discrimination had been simmering in the back of my mind for a few days, and I began to wonder whether there existed an unintentional, unconscious “discrimination” in the fashion industry. I’m not talking about it in terms of discrimination against certain models (though the lack of minorities on the walkway and in catalogues may be a valid concern), but rather in terms of the sheer choice and availability of clothes that match one’s skin color.

The fashion industry came into being with “a confluence of English ingenuity, German chemistry, French fashion, and American entrepreneurship” (The New Yorker, Vol 29 No. 2). All were, of course, of Western origin and thus tailored to a Western clientele with, well, predominantly “white” skin tones. (“white” in the sense of a race, and not the physical color of the skin, and thus “white skin tones” denotes an entire palette of skin tones) And so, perhaps certain dyes and colors slowly came to be used more often as people figured out that they went better with their skin tones. (not accounting for seasonal variation and fashion “in”s)

After World War II, when France fell from its tower in the fashion industry and had to share a pedestal with the UK, Italy, US, and later Japan (which has a host of very interestingly-cut designs and use of stark monochrome), we still saw a fashion world that was dominated by Western styles and tastes.

And even if the nexus of fashion is now distributed across a few poles, my hypothesis is that there exists a distribution of colors that perhaps leans toward a particular mean of skin tone that isn’t necessarily the global average. Granted, every country or region has its own local styles, with whites and reds used in Eastern Asia, and earthy colors (from what I’m seen, at least) in Africa, but nevertheless the dominant fashions are the ones that you seen in advertisements, catalogues, movies, and in the streets all across the world.

The way I see it, there may be potential for a market for clothes that cater to a different mean and different distribution of skin tones, a market that is fashionable but also fills in the color deficiencies of our current fashion industry and takes advantage of the fact that there might be people who would like to find colors that go well with their skin tone with more ease. With the internationalization of the fashion industry, such a market might eventually evolve, but why wait when this opportunity awaits?

A flurry of updates…

Up until this week, my experience here has felt largely filtered by the program organizers, whom I feel have chosen certain orientation activities because it’s what they think we want to do, which is somewhat different than what we actually came here to learn. We were shown a slew of beaches, shopping districts, and the best streets for clubs and bars—places tourists would be interested in, I’m sure, and good places to keep in mind for the weekends—but I think they overlooked the fact that many of us chose to come here of all places because it offered a fundamentally serious and thought-provoking experience as well.

It was probably easy to throw a label on all of these water bottle-carrying Americans and show them a good time, but this bread-and-circus orientation fell short on priming most of us for tackling some of the more serious issues we were sure to face in the coming months.

Now that classes have finally started, I think all of us can get out of this retirement home mentality, shake of some of that crusty indolence, and get down to business.

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Classes:
Global Political Thought (chosen mostly because of its excellent primary source reading list)
War and Society
Xhosa

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There’s a certain pattern of pride that I’m starting to see among formerly colonized countries. Some would probably characterize it as a strain of inferiority complex, and others as natural consequence of burgeoning modernity, but in the end it manifests itself in attitude that’s something along the lines of, “Hey, we have what you have. We can do what you do. Look! (please)” It’s this attitude, I think, that leads tour guides and eager locals to take tourists to places that are, ultimately, disappointingly Western, as if to demonstrate what their country has achieved, rather than what makes the country and culture unique.

After China emerged from its 百年羞耻 (“Hundred Years of Shame”), for example, it started to build the skyscrapers, superhighways, and sleek subway systems that have come to characterize a handful of its brochure-friendly cities. For me, however, these very monuments of modernity and pillars of national pride to a certain extent detract from what I’m looking for (however vague that notion may be). And despite the soma-laced rhythm of life in the past two weeks, I think it’s this particular undercurrent of sentiments that I’ve been treading on. It’s as if I’ve been meandering down a long hallway (one very likely decorated by someone with much better taste than I), and I hear a curious cacophony of voices emanating from one of the doorways, and though I’ve found the door I have yet to be let in. Perhaps I’ll let myself in.

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I’ve resolved to expand my cooking repertoire over the course of this semester. I suspect that last semester I would have taken the title of “Independent Who Not Only Cooked the Least But Also Knew How to Cook the Least.” Our Spelman kitchen consisted of an impressive collection of two forks, an overused frying pan, an aging spoon, a single all-purpose bowl, and usually some eggs, a lonely stick of butter and a carton of orange juice in the refrigerator. On special occasions, we would borrow “supplies” (like salt) from our sympathetic (and skeptical) neighbors, but for the most part we were minimalists in every sense of the word.

This semester, I’m living with eight people from six different countries (not to mention the 22 across the street) who mostly know how to cook, and so I’m going to take the next 5 months to build that culinary knowledge base.

¿†Love†?

Topics to be probed after finals:

Why are there so few options for punctuation marks at the end of sentences? Would language be more efficient or expressive if we had access to more than a "." , "?" or "!" ? That is, with punctuation marks that can add a variety of different additional overtones to the sentence, we wouldn't need to express certain meanings using additional words, but could just use the punctuation mark at the end of the sentence to denote implied meaning or emphasis. Or, conversely, for example, we could really experiment with more sophisticated types of irony with a bigger palette of punctuation marks to choose from.

Why are the majority of songs we hear about love? I've wondered about this for years. I suppose a lot of people are inspired by love, but people are also inspired by an inconceivable number of other things as well. (Like this little known gem, which I suppose can still be considered a type of love) Is the fact that love (or lost love, or hatred because of something that happened because of love, or love for God, or hoped-for love... you get the idea) is simply the greatest common denominator, and thus strikes resonances with more people? I find this doubtful. Remember, back in the day, when bard songs about warriors and mythical beasts were all the rage?

Hard Times

Unfortunately, I will be largely silent for the next three weeks, which will demanding in a way I never thought possible. We'll see how I emerge. If only finals were the only thing that had to be taken care of, if only.

In the meantime, learn how to change the world, see how other people are doing it, and go do it yourself.

Mortality

Do you ever have moments in life when you feel suddenly, profoundly, and very vulnerably mortal?

Whenever I get this sensation, it's as if the world zooms out and fast-forwards, with centuries going by until all I see is a blur of nature, the remnants of our civilization subsumed by very ordinary things like rocks and trees and rivers. And whenever I will myself to see the world from that perspective, my life is a mere blip, a handful of frames in the millions of simultaneous films being played around us. When I then vision the world just bustling along after I've left, I expect to feel a nagging sense of "Hey, do you remember me? I was here."-- but I don't. I'm content just to see that the world has gone on.


Maybe Alan Weisman had this feeling too, and maybe it was strong enough for him to write A World Without Us. And maybe David Fincher, Eric Roth and F. Scott Fitzgerald each felt it in his own way when they worked on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. As I watched the film this evening, those thoughts were awoken once more. I was surprised. Strange at it may sound, this sort of thing usually comes around whenever I've been looking at really large trees.

Wait... which one are you again?

I wonder if it's harder to form close friendships if you have an identical twin who goes to the same school as you do. Does the fact that most people cognitively clump you together with your brother/sister deter from them getting to know you as individuals?

I know that I sometimes have trouble getting past that initial awkwardness of telling identical twins apart, which makes it harder for me to move beyond that barrier and go into "real friendship" territory. It's easier if you get to know one twin first, and then meet the other twin later, but that's not always the case.

Driving

I've recently re-discovered the fun in driving. The utility I get from all that tire-screeching and burning definitely surpasses the cost of new BFGoodrich tires ($62.99) from Costco.

I must insist that I am a perfectly safe driver at the same time. Since at got my license all those years back, I have never been in an accident, and have been the recipient of only 2 tickets-- and for the lamest reasons. One was for doing a California stop in my own neighborhood. The other was for driving in the left lane. Yes, driving in the left lane.

For anyone out there who didn't know (and is reading this when police ticket quotas are almost due), driving in the left lane is illegal. It's technically a passing lane. I got fined $100 in Massachusetts for "Driving in the Left Lane." And because I live in NJ and CA, I couldn't go up to MA to challenge that abuse of police power in court.