Skip to main content

Dark Face

The racism inherent in the technology of camera phone is a problem a brown woman like myself is very familiar with specially if she happens to be one is frequently shares the frame with light-skinned people. The only way for me to get a passably decent picture is to put on make-up with HD powder to finish and make sure the lighting is near prefect. These conditions are not achievable in a candid shot and out comes a picture where my face looks dimension-less, weirdly blotchy, deathly exhausted and worse. It's not they way I want to memorialize the moment - not sure anyone else in the picture wants it either. 

I don't wear makeup regularly and am fortunate to have skin that can get away without it. In pictures taken by a phone (which is almost always the case these days), the light-skinned person in the frame looks mostly like themselves, maybe a notch paler in comparison to my much darker version as the phone camera renders me. I have absolutely no problem with dark skin (my own or that of anyone else - its who we are naturally and it is perfect for us) and I am very happy with the shade of brown I am. I do have a problem being turned into a caricature of myself and being forced to use makeup to try and get around it. 

It is not that tech companies or smartphones are inherently racist. The people developing these technologies, which usually are made in US companies, are overwhelmingly using data sets that are heavily influenced by white people. What tech companies and smartphone makers can be accused of, is ignorance. Having said that, we’re not sure if that’s a good enough defence.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more