[Paleopsych] Counterpunch: Amina Mire: Pigmentation and Empire
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Amina Mire: Pigmentation and Empire: The Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry
http://counterpunch.com/mire07282005.html
[Thanks to Laird for this.]
5.7.28
By AMINA MIRE
Skin-whitening or skin-bleaching is a practice whereby women (and some
men) use various forms of skin-whitening products in order to make
their skin appear as white as possible. As an anti-aging therapy,
skin-whitening promises to "restore" as well as to"transform" the
aging skins of women and make them smooth,
wrinkle-free-younger-looking. In this context, the natural aging
process is systematically framed as a pathological condition which
must be interrupted through measures such as "elective surgery" and or
by bleaching out the signs of aging such as "age spots." In this way,
in the case of white women, skin-whitening is presented as a
legitimate intervention designed to 'cure' and mitigate the disease of
aging. Skin-whitening as a biomedical intervention is predicated on
the pathologization of the natural aging processes in all women, white
women in particular.
At least in the United States, racially white eastern and southern
European women have used skin-whitening in order to appear as 'white'
as their 'Anglo-Saxon' "native" white sisters. In the United States,
women of colour also have practiced skin-whitening. Many of the early
skin-bleaching commodities such as Nodinalina skin bleaching cream, a
product which has been in the US market since 1889, contained 10 per
cent ammoniated mercury. Mercury is a highly toxic agent with serious
health implications. According to Kathy Peiss , in 1930, a single
survey found advertising for 232 different brand names of
skin-bleaching creams promoted in mainstream magazines to mainly white
women consumers in the United States.
If dark skinned eastern and southern Europeans can "pass" for white
with a little help from skin-bleaching creams, those with sufficiently
light skin tones but who are legally categorized as racially black by
their invisible " one drop" of "black blood", could also "pass" for
white as well. The "appearance of whiteness" is the key to accessing
the exclusive cultural and economic privileges whiteness accrues. The
fear of the infiltration of "invisible' blackness has fuelled both the
marketing strategies of industry and the anxieties of white women that
they may not appear "white enough". Peiss writes:
Dorothy Dignam's ads for Nadinola skin bleach and Nadine face
power, appearing in mass circulation women's magazine, resurrected
the Old South. "This line made in the South was largely sold to the
Negro market; the advertising was a planned attempt to capture the
white market also. Her paean to "the beauty secret of Southern
women," featuring plantations, magnolia blossoms, and hoop-skirted
bells, erased any hint of Nadinola's black clientele. Although
usually rendered obliquely, racial prejudice was an explicit
talking point for manufacturers Albert F. Wood: "A white person
objects to a swarthy brown-hued or mulatto-like skin, therefore if
staying much out of doors use regularly Satin Skin Vanishing
Greaseless Cream to keep the skin normally white (Peiss 1998,150).
But even though the anxiety of bearing the invisible mark of black
blood has, in part, fuelled white women's skin-whitening practices,
Peiss rejects the actual possibility that some women of colour may
have passed for white by using skin-whitening creams. This is because,
according to Peiss, African American women had "disabling" African
features that would not allow them to pass for white. In this way,
while skin-whitening helped 'dark skinned' eastern and southern
European immigrant women to blend into the "secure" domain of
whiteness, the racial border between whiteness and blackness is
magically secured by the social and political order of the colour
line.
Women might purchase a skin whitener that covered and colored the skin
and simultaneously disclaim its status as paint. For women of European
descent, whitening could be absorbed within acceptable skincare
routine and assimilated into the ruling beauty ideas, the natural face
of white genteel womanhood-although, as Jessie Benton Frémont
testified, one glance at the hands could undo this careful effort to
naturalize artifice. For African Americans, the fiction was
impossible: Whitening cosmetics, touted as cures for "disabling"
African features, reinforced a racialized aesthetic through a makeover
that appeared anything but natural.
What these more than "skin deep," uniquely "disabling" African
features were is not stated by Peiss. However, this crude insinuation
hints at Peiss' refusal to entertain the possibility that
skin-whitening may have been used not just by eastern and southern
dark skinned women to "pass for Anglo-Saxons," but that women of
colour who were sufficiently light skinned have also practiced
skin-whitening in order to "pass" for white. Since appearing white is
the "only game in town," there are no other grounds outside of
appearance on which whiteness as an exclusive racial identity can be
secured. Piess's historical documentation of the history of the
formation and consolidation of the American beauty industry clearly
demonstrates that skin-whitening has facilitated the "racial passing"
of certain dark skinned women from eastern and southern Europe. In
this context, the practice of skin-whitening is implicated in the
American history of racial segregation and racial "passing."
Peiss's analysis precludes the possibility of African Americans with
light skins passing for white by using skin-whitening creams, while
claiming that eastern and southern European women with "dark skin
tones" could do so, implicitly offers skin-whitening as 'legitimate'
when practicd by 'white' women and as 'illegitimate' and futile for
women of colour. This is also the paradigm of much of the published
medical literature on the health risks associated with the use of
skin-whitening creams with toxic chemical agents. Even though white
women have been using both lead and mercury based skin-whitening
creams in order to whiten their faces and bodies for centuries, when
it comes to warning the public about the dangers associated with this
deadly practice, it is often the terribly damaged faces of women of
colour which are used for visual illustration.
For example, almost all the medical literature published by western
medical and dermatology journals offer us women of colour as victims
of the dubious desire for unattainable corporeal whiteness. This same
unattainable desire is often reinforced with horrifying images of the
damaged faces and bodies of women of color after using cheap
skin-whitening creams containing toxic chemical agents such as
ammoniated mercury, corticosteroids, and hydroquinone.
The faces of Black South Africans permanently damaged by long-term use
of Over-the-Counter (OTC) 2 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening
cream.
The emphasis on such 'health risks'has facilitated the production, and
marketing around the world, of new and, conceivably, 'safer' but
highly expensive skin-whitening commodities and combatant
technologies. The emerging 'high-end' skin-whitening commodities are
marketed mainly to affluent Asian women to modify skin tone, also to
white women as anti-aging therapy.
So, as one might might expect, race, class and gender dynamics inform
the marketing strategy of the new skin-whitening corporate drive. The
symbolic and literal 'whitening' of darker bodies still conditions the
advertising rhetoric for skin-whitening products.
In Africa, the practice of skin-whitening is traditionally associated
with white colonial oppression . Those who practiced skin-whitening,
were and are still condemned as self-hating dupes, suffering from an
inferiority complex. Consequently, those engaging in this practice
often do so covertly. So it is only when users of skin-whitening seek
medical help from the devastating effects of bodily damage caused by
the use of toxic skin-whitening creams that news about this practice
gets to the public domain. Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous
Conditions (1988) succinctly captures the contradiction between the
colonizing effects of white supremacy and African women's yearning for
respectability and idealized feminine aesthetics of beauty.
Lucia was my mother's sister, several years younger than my mother
and a wild woman in spite of or may be because of her beauty. She
was dark like my mother, but unlike my mother her complexion always
had a light shinning from underneath the skin, so she could afford
to scoff at the skin-lightening creams that other girls used.
The association in the above quote of girls with "bad skin" with the
use of skin-lightening cream is interesting. On the one hand, it
suggests that skin-whitening has a therapeutic function. On the other
hand, it may be referring to one of the sinister side effects of the
use of skin-whitening: the systemic darkening of the affected area of
the skin due to the accumulation of toxic skin-whitening residue
inside the skin called exogenous ochrinosis (cf.2). Currently, many
African countries have banned the commercial trafficking of
skin-whitening. However, skin-whitening products, including those
containing highly toxic chemical agents, are currently aggressively
marketed to white women in North America as "anti-aging therapy." It
is not clear how 2 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening cream
can cause a permanent disfigurement of African women's faces and
bodies while 4 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening cream can be
promoted to white women as anti-aging therapy. The following ad is for
a skin-whitening cream called Lustra which contains 4 per cent
hydroquinone.
This is the same chemical agent which has caused the disfigurement of
the South African woman in the above image and of countless other
women around the world. This product is manufactured by a major US-
based pharmaceutical company. Lustra skin-whitening cream is
extensively promoted on internet shops, beauty salons and dermatology
offices in the United States. The primary clientele of Lustra are
white middle-class women
Currently, transnational biotechnology, pharmaceutical and cosmetics
corporations are engaged in the research and development and the mass
marketing of a plethora of new forms of skin-whitening products which
can "bleach-out" the "dark skin tones" of women of colour and can
remove corporeal evidence of the aging processes, 'unhealthy
life-style' and overall pollution from the skin of white women. In
North America and Europe, the emerging high-end skin-whitening
products have been promoted as new 'therapeutic' regimes which can
'cleanse,' 'purify' and 'regenerate' aging skin. Consequently, in
North America and Europe, skin-whitening commodities aimed at white
women are often sold under the bannerof 'anti-aging skincare.' In
other parts of the world skin-whitening commodities are promoted to
'whiten' and 'brighten' the 'dark skin tones' of women of colour.
This growing industry is a lucrative one whose reach is greatly
facilitated by systematic use of the internet as the main medium for
the dissemination of advertising messages for skin-whitening products
and related technologies. Some of the leading transnational
corporations engaged in the 'trafficking' of skin-whitening products
have extensive e-business domains. Often these companies set up
internet domains and e-shops in specific countries such as China,
Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, just to name a
few. In addition to such e-business sales drives, extensive use of the
internet allows these corporations to avoid both the negative
political implications and legal regulatory restrictions they could
face if they were to openly promote skin-whitening commodities in
North America and European markets.
The 'ethnic' skin-whitening market around the world is decentralized
as well being covert. This is because many of the skin-whitening
products which target poor women, particularly black women, including
women of colour living in North America and Europe, are relatively
cheap but often contain highly toxic chemical agents such as mercury,
hydroquinone and corticosteroids.
In Europe and North America, the 'ethnic" skin-whitening products are
usually sold in 'ethnic-oriented' grocery stores and "beauty" salons.
Many of these low end' but toxic skin-whitening products are
manufactured in the Third World and are imported both legally and
illegally to North America and Europe. Even though the western health
authorities are well aware of the health risks associated with these
toxic skin-whitening products they have taken very littlem if any,
action to control their importation or to regulate their sales.
The other, more robust trend is the marketing of expensive
skin-whitening products to affluent Asian women in living in Pacific
Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, Singapore,
Malaysia, Indonesia and others. This represents the largest slice of
the skin-whitening global market.
Partly because of the covert nature of the trafficking and informal
circulation of toxic skin-whitening commodities, it is hard to gain
accurate estimates of the market share of the 'low end' but highly
toxic skin-whitening market. Similarly, because the 'high end' and,
presumably less toxic skin-whitening commodities targeted to whites
are promoted under the purview of 'anti-aging therapy,' it is as
difficult to gain an accurate or even a generally reliable estimate of
the North America and European market shares of skin-whitening
products targeted to white women. However, in Asia, where the
skin-whitening market outside of Europe and North America is anchored,
in 2001, in Japan alone, the skin-whitening market was estimated to be
worth $ 5.6. billion. According to the same report, the fastest
growing skin-whitening market in Asia is China. In 2001, China's
skin-whitening market was estimated to be over $ 1.3 billion.
Based on the readily available mass of online advertising for emerging
'high end' skin-whitening products by transnational corporations,
these products claim that they can 'improve' the 'appearance' as well
as the 'health' of users. These skin-whitening commodities have
powerful pharmaceutical properties; they can penetrate the skin and
suppress the synthesis of the skin pigment, melanin . Indeed, the
suppression of 'dark' pigment, melanin, is listed as an explicit
example of skin-whitening health promotion benefits. Frantz Fanon
wrote about the "corporeal malediction" of dark skin and here's the
antidote! The damned of the earth can thus swiftly alleviate their
condition by peaceful, albeit commercial means.
In many of the advertisements for skin-whitening I come across during
my research, a discursive link is made between youthfulness and
whiteness and whiteness and racial superiority. Second, in these
advertisements, the aging process of white women is often implicitly
racialized by the construction of 'hyper-pigmentation,' 'age-spots,'
'dull' skin tone,' as signs of "pigmentation pathologies".
Consequently, skin-whitening advertising directed to white women often
promises to 'cleanse,' 'purify,' 'transform' and 'restore' white
women's 'smooth' and 'radiant' youthful white skin. Such advertising
tries to expand the skin-whitening market with the covert rhetoric of
racializing aesthetics. One recurring theme which runs through most of
the promotional ads for skin-whitening posted at Asia registered
internet sites is the claim that skin-whitening cosmetics can
transform the 'yellow' skin tones of Asian women to flawlessly
'radiant' white. These advertisements often deploy the visual
technique of 'before' images of 'unhappy,' 'dark' faces of
'Asian-looking' models and 'after' images of smiling 'whitened' faces
of the same models .
I now want to take the reader to the internet-based advertisements for
skin-whitening products by the world's largest cosmetics company a
leading promoter of new skin-whitening cosmetics the L'Oreal
cosmetics company. L'Oreal's advertisements for skin-whitening
products posted at internet sites run by L'Oreal subsidiaries such as
Lancôme, Vichy Laboratories and L'Oreal Paris systematically deploy a
mixture of racializing rhetoric and dazzling visual images.
Many of these advertisements which are directed mainly to Asian women
use images and narratives with implicit references to the aesthetic
'inferiority' of 'dark' and 'yellow' skin tones of Asian women. In
these ads, this implied is often reinforced with illustrations of the
pathological nature of 'dark' and 'yellow' skin tones of
'Asian-looking' models.
With over US$14 billion sales in 2003, L'Oreal is the largest
cosmetics company in the world. The company can be best understood as
an economic 'super-structure' consisting of, at least, 12 major
subsidiaries such as Lancôme Paris, Vichy Laboratories, La Roche-Posay
Laboratoire Pharmacaceutique, Biotherm, L'Oreal Paris, Garnier,
L'Oreal professional Paris, Giorgio Armani Perfumes, Maybelline New
York, Ralph Lauren, Helena Rubinstein skincare, Shu Uemura, Maxtrix,
Redken, SoftSheen-Carlson(TM). Not all of the above listed L'Oreal
subsidiaries deal with the promotion of skin-whitening cosmetics.
However, this extensive list of L'Oreal subsidiaries illustrates the
company's economic power and structural complexity. L'Oreal is also a
20 per cent shareholder of a major French based pharmaceutical firm,
Sanofi-Synthélabo.
A recent merger worth 60£ billion with another European based
pharmaceutical firm, Aventis, makes Sanofi-Aventis the third largest
pharmaceutical company in the world behind Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline.
I emphasize the financial link between Sanofi-Aventis and L'Oreal
cosmetics in the present work partly to highlight L'Oreal's close
connection with the pharmaceutical industry. Skin-whitening, in this
context, can be thought of as a lucrative 'spin-off' both for L'Oreal
as well as a way to valorize research and development of
pharmaceuticals outside the highly regulated biomedical domain.
The influence of the pharmaceutical industry is evidenced by much of
L'Oreal's promotional rhetoric for skin-whitening cosmetics and
related technologies. L'Oreal's ads for skin-whitening cosmetics
increasingly blur the line between cosmetic and pharmaceutical claims.
Such close integration between the cosmetics and pharmaceutical
industries has serious social, medical, and political implications. In
fact, L'Oreal has already designated some of its subsidiaries, such as
Vichy Laboratories and LA Roche-Posay Laboratoire Pharmaceutique, as
quasi-pharmaceutical outlets through which the company can
successfully promote skin-whitening and other cosmetics under the
rubric of skincare biomedicine. The following ads for Vichy
Laboratories attest to this opportunistic cosmetic/pharmaceutical
industrial cross-fertilization.
Discover your healthy skin profile: skin type and hydration. Make
an appointment with your Vichy dermatological skin care consultant
to identify your skin type, its hydration level and receive a skin
diagnosis and personalized skincare recommendation. Vichy
Laboratories are devoted to the health of your skin. Backed by
dermatological research, Vichy offers you a complete line of
skincare products containing Vichy Thermal Spa Water. Dehydration,
dryness, skin aging and dull complexion. Vichy, health skin's
answer to all skin conditions.
Not all of Vichy's advertising messages are couched in such biomedical
rhetoric. For instance, when targeting women of colour, Asian women in
particular, their 'dark' or 'yellow' skin tones are often
conceptualized as pathological targets amenable to 'fixing' and
transformation. L'Oreal's internet domains registered in South Korea
and China, Singapore, Taiwan aggressively promote skin-whitening
products with such provocative brand names as "BI-White," "White
"Perfect" and "Blanc Expert." In one of the most stunning acts of
commodity racism, an ad for Vichy's skin-whitening brand, "BI-White,"
features what appears to be an Asian woman peeling off her black
facial skin with a zipper. As her black skin is removed a new
'smooth,' 'whitened' skin with no blemishes takes its place. The
implications of this image are blunt and chilling. Blackness is false,
dirty and ugly. Whiteness is true, healthy, clean and beautiful.
"BI-White:The skin Pigmentation ID."
Source: [221]http://www.vichy.com/gb/biwhite.
L'Oreal calls this marketing strategy 'Geocosmetics:
More than half of Korean women experience brown spots and 30 per
cent of them have a dull complexion. Over-production of melanin
deep in the skin that triggers brown spots and accumulation of
melanin loaded dead cells at the skin's surface create a dull and
uneven complexion. Vichy Laboratories has been able to associate
the complementary effectiveness of Kojic Acid and pure Vitamin C in
an everyday face care: BI-White.
Another L'Oreal advertisement for skin-whitening brand is called
"White Perfect." This particular skin-whitening brand is sold in
L'Oreal's Asian markets and online e-shops. In that way, those who
live outside Asia can purchase this and other L'Oreal skin-whitening
brands over the internet.
In this ad, the racist aesthetics of "White-Perfect" reinforces the
biomedicalized intervention of Asian women's skin coded by the sign of
"Melanin-Block(TM)." L'Oreal's advertisements for skin-whitening
cosmetics are often reinforced by constant interplay between the
ideological precepts of white supremacy and the
technologically-mediated suppression or "blocking" of the capacity for
Asian women's bodies and skins to produce skin pigment, melanin.
One of the ways in which L'Oreal enacts the biomedicalization of
women's bodies and the racialization of the aging processes of women
(gendered degeneracy) is through the visual technology of dismembering
women's bodies. A close examination of L'Oreal's advertisings for
skin-whitening products shows a systematic fragmentation of women's
bodies. Almost all the L'Oreal advertising images which I have came
across use cropped faces of women. One of the visual techniques used
by L'Oreal is the pairing of two cropped faces: one of which bears
certain pseudo-pathologies such as 'age spots,' premature-aging,'
'hyper-pigmentation,' and 'wrinkles.' The other cropped image would
feature the whitened, 'smooth, wrinkle-free' face of a woman.
As a result, L'Oreal's advertising often visually conceptualizes the
practice of skin-whitening both as a violent technological
fragmentation of women's bodies as well as an instrument of bodily
transformation. As the following advertising for L'Oreal's
skin-whitening brand, Blanc Expert, shows, the visual fragmentation of
women's bodies is often reinforced by the claims of the power of these
skin-whitening products to penetrate deep inside the body thereby
transforming both the inside and the outside of the users of these
products.
Lancôme's exclusive Melo-No Complex(TM) limits the activity of the
messenger NO, a newly-discovered stimulator of melanin, produced by
keratinocytes. The complex, by targeting keratinocytes, boosts
whitening action by 15 times. A powerful combination of active
whitening ingredients targets melanocytes to more effectively inhibit
the source of melanin production and as a result, diminishes the
skin's yellowish tone.
The image symbolically illustrates the technological prowess of
advanced skin-whitening biotechnology; its ability to penetrate,
fragment, colonize, and discipline the bodies of women. In this image,
the fragmentation of women's bodies is symbolically illustrated by a
beam of light shot through a tube. Upon penetrating the skin, this
phallic beam of light produces a new "radiant," white face.
In this powerful visually fragmenting technology, the symbolic order
of masculinist technology and the aesthetics of white supremacy are
rendered as flesh in the "flawless", perfectly whitened and fragmented
face of a woman of colour.
In this context, the aggressive world-wide marketing of skin-whitening
commodities can be legitimated as benevolent 'cures' designed to
transform and transcend the "dark" "diseased," bodies of women of
colour. Ironically, not all women of colour can afford the "radiant"
whitened faces this technology promises. The following is a price list
for L'Oreal's Blanc Expert line. As I indicated earlier, this
particular skin-whitening brand name is aggressively promoted to Asian
women. Blanc Expert Mela-No Cx Blacc Expert Advanced Whitening Spot
Corrector (30 ml= $125 US), Blanc Expert Mela-NO Cx Supreme Whitening
Spot Corrector (30ml= $100 US ), Blanc Expert Advanced Whitening &
Anti-Dark Circles Eye (100ml= $ 77 US), Blanc Expert Mela NO Cx
Advanced Whitening Night Renovator (100ml= $ 83 US). This one has the
'cutest' and the most ironic name: Blanc Expert Mela-No Cx UV Expert
Extra Large Double Protection SPF 50/PA+++ (30 ml= $59 US).
This list clearly demonstrates two important points: that these
products are highly expensive and that they contain relatively small
amounts of skin-whitening products. There is a common joke in Africa
to describe the practice of face whitening: "Fanta Faces & Coca Cola
Bodies." Fanta, in this context, refers to the orange colour of a soft
drink. The dark colour of the Coke soft drink in contrast refers to
the unbleached bodies of African women. This analogy is particularly
apt because, like skin-bleaching cosmetics, Coca Cola and Fanta soft
drinks are western products which are extensively marketed in Africa.
In its broadest sense, skin-whitening as 'anti-aging therapy' aims at
intervening, 'halting' and if possible, 'reversing' the aging
processes of mainly white women. I have suggested earlier that
advertisements for skin-whitening products which are marketed to white
women often use language suffused with the racialization of the aging
processes of white women and the biomedicalization of women of
colour's skin tones.
In this market, the paradigmatic face against which both women of
colour and middle aged white women must be appraised, and ultimately
found wanting, is the 'smooth/ radiant/youthful-looking' white face
unmarked by age, labour or class. This technologically-produced
'radiant,' 'age-spot-free,' 'pigmentation-free' young-looking white
face is now the universal standard for the "beautiful" face.
The cover of the 2002 L'Oreal Annual Report underscores the emergence
of the "smooth". 'radiant', technologically produced, "air brushed"
white face. In this image, a female with exceedingly blue eyes and
perfectly white skin gazes vacantly. Her face shows no hint of life or
emotions. This image is simultaneously as frightening as it is
ambiguous. It is difficult to tell whether we are confronting a
computer-generated animation or an image of an actual woman. This
ambiguity is not innocent. The image at once suggests the corporeal
possibility of a perfectly white skin and also whiteness as an
abstract aesthetics. The ambiguity of the corporeality of this image
can be read as an ironic comment on the image itself. In this reading,
this computer-generated visual simulacrum recuperates the exclusionary
aesthetics of whiteness.
L'Oreal has also developed other powerful tools which are designed to
monitor the states of women's skin and bodies. One instrument of
surveillance is a silicon-based semiconductor sensory device called
SkinChip®. First developed for biometric fingerprinting ID and related
surveillance technologies, this technology has now been adapted as a
'diagnostic' tool designed to monitor changes in the 'interiors' of
women's skin such as "pigmentation" and "hydration" levels and other
'pathological' signs. Monitoring the "interior" of women's skin to
gauge their "pigmentation" status has the potential to usher in a new
and sinter form of eugenicist white supremacist aesthetics. The fact
that SkinChip has been imported from biometric surveillance technology
is not insignificant.
Surveillance technologies such as SkinChip also reinforce the
aesthetics of white supremacy and the global expansion of
skin-whitening as a capitalist commodity. L'Oreal is currently
developing a personal-size version of the SkinChip device so that
women can regularly monitor what is happening "inside" their bodies
and on their skins.
I hope that I have demonstrated that the emerging skin-whitening
industry is a lucrative globalized economic enterprise with profound
social and political implications. L'Oreal's advertising for
skin-whitening commodities reinforces and consolidates the globalized
ideology of white supremacy and the sexist practice of the
biomedicialization of women's bodies. It is in this specific context
of the continuum of the western practice of global racism and the
economic practice of commodity racism that the social, political and
cultural implications of skin-whitening must be located and resisted.
Consequently, feminist/antiracist and anti-colonial responses must
confront this social phenomenon as part and parcel of our old enemy,
the "civilising mission" ; the violent moral prerogative to cleanse
and purify the mind and bodies of the "dark/dirt/savage". On March 10,
2004, two weeks prior to the American invasion of Iraq, Time
magazine's cover featured the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.
The caption reads: "Life After Saddam: an inside look at Bush's
high-risk plan to occupy Iraq and remake the Middle East" . Hussein's
face is painted white by a white man wearing a white casual shirt with
matching casual white pants and a white baseball hat using a white
paint brush. The colour of the dictrator's unpainted skin looks
exceedingly black and menacing. The lower half of the dictator's face
and neck are riddled with bullet holes.
Amina Mire is at the University of Toronto and can be reached at
[222]amina.mire at utoronto.ca
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