On Air Editorial
For use on September 17th 2002
Original Article taken from "The Source" magazine October 2002 issue.
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"What is this? The sting of Irony?"
Now normally I dont read the Source magazine, but monday I was in the station for a meeting ad we got the new issue, so of course during some of the less eventful points in the day I was reading it mostly out of boredom, when I sumbled upon an important article written by a Jamilya Chisolm. She was speaking about the Problem with skin bleaching and it's over rampant use in one particular country in Africa, Ghana to be exact. The main thing that was extoled in the article was the mentality that "Some people say Black is beutiful, But white is Beauty" and I am quoting directly from someone who uses the bleach mentioned in the article. But the question is why? why sould anyone want to screw around with their skin tone? I mean pushing aside the faux King of pop and all why? is this some sort of old ingrained self-hate and loathing? you bet your behind it is, fact is, you ask most folks who they'd tarm beutifil and you'd probably hear about a lot of white folks, I'd even hedge to bet thats the truth amongst the black community here also. The question is why though... and the answer is simple, it's part of the degredation, to prove this I dare you the listener to turn on the TV, see whos on the news see what people are in the miss america pagent, see whos on talk shows seems pretty unbalanced right? What's on tv is that distasteful sterotype of beauty, some overly skinny tendy fashion wearing fop lacking in the brains department and the miss america pagent is a really prime example of this... can any of you tell me how many of those contestants were dark skinned? exactly! But back to the real issue, the over rampant use of bleaching which is akin to the stragight hair fads we have in this country, but then we use bleaching too, but just to remove blemishes....take out small imperfections there it's become a way of life, something that's standard issue for some in the lower class, especially in the case of postitutes who have the beleif that they will earn more if they are lighter and this beleif isn't unfounded sadly. More importantly In far east africa the whole skin bleaching base is a mutli million dollar buisness of seeling people eventual disfigurements, to the point that Ghana, kenya, nigeria south africa and uganda's governments are actively trying to control if not cease the import of the products.
"In may 2001, Kenya's Bureau of standards banned the sale of more then eighty skin-bleaching products manufactured in the west. Following their example Uganda set out last August to outlaw dozens of popular creams and soaps, four onths later Nigeria's federal government proposed a ban on twenty imports, including bleach produced in europe".
If it wasn't a problem do you think the responce would not have been so big? Of course not and the main reason is in a chemical called Hydroquinone, a potential carcinogen found in a lot of those whitener creams, it works by killing off the melanin producing cells from the outer layer of the skin, and mind you without melanin in some level radiation would be frying your innards. Keep in mind a carcenogen is something that can potentially either cause cancer in this case indirectly or heart problems, and if that wasn't bad enough the creames themselves can cause skin scarring over long terms of use. To compound the problem some bleach creams incorperate steroids and can cause delayed healing of wounds, permanent stretch marks and hyper inflammatory pigmentation. Esentially, if you really need that chemical to fix something that isn't broken, perhaps it's something else like therapy you need.