Hispanics. Better Have a Lighter Skin Tone.

According to a survey carried out by the Pew Research Center in the United States last year, 58% of Hispanic adults report having experienced discrimination because of their ethnicity. Experiences, however, vary by skin tone: 50% of Hispanics with lighter skin colours versus 64% of Hispanics with darker skin colours. The differences even hold after controlling variables such as gender, age, education and country of birth (U.S. vs abroad).



More Hispanics with darker skin tone (55%) than with lighter skin tone (36%) say that people tend to react as if they were not smart and are more often subject to slurs or jokes (53% vs 34%) (via).

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photograph of Benicio del Toro via

The -ism Series (29): Gingerism

"Growing up as a redhead I was lucky enough to escape with just the occasional name-calling - having the surname Jaffa was no doubt a double-whammy. But attacking someone on the basis of their hair colour can be every bit as damaging as persecuting someone for their race (sic) or religion, and therefore, in some cases, needs to be taken just as seriously."
Sharon Jaffa, journalist



Ginger-baiting is discussed as a British phenomenon. At the same time, Britian is "the most red-headed part of the world" (via). Children are bullied at school because of the colour of their hair, women are stereotyped as fiery, sensuous, alluring, and emotionally instable, men suffer from more abuse (via and via). According to a study, nine out of ten ginger-haired men have been bullied (via).
In the US, red hair is not associated with teasing or bullying, it may even be considered as glamorous (via). In other European countries it is "celebrated and seen as something going back to the Vikings, representing strength and vigour" (via). Culture and gender play a role: Women with red hair in the U.S. are less anxious than men with red hair in the U.K. (O'Regan, 2014). Speculations about the reasons why there is gingerism in the U.K. range from Shakespeare's menacing characters having red hair, anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century (via), redheads being accociated with sin and accused of being witches and burnt in the 15th century, to Ancient Egypt where the red-haired god Set who was believed to cause earthquakes and thunderstorms  and was calmed down by his worshippers by sacrifycing humans, i.e. redheads (via). "Just why this prejudice persists in 21st-century Britain is a mystery." (via)



A problem often mentioned is that nobody seems to feel responsible to protect those affected. It is not racism, not sexism, there are no marches, no education campaigns (via). The majority seems to think that it is acceptable to "slag off" people with red hair (Thorne, 2011).

"Red hair is an issue. Particularly in this country. Teachers often let it [bullying] happen because there isn’t a stigma around it in the way there is, quite rightly, about something like racism." Lily Cole

While some seem to think that treating gingerism like e.g. racism, sexism or homophobia could be a promising way to tackle the problem, others see discrepancies. Gingerism is tragic and wrong but not necessarily an -ism that can be compared to the core diversity dimensions and the discrimination mechanisms associated with them:

I'm a proud ginger and I've been abused, insulted and even, as a child, assaulted and bullied for it. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but I'm pretty sure I have never been denied a job or the lease on a flat because of my complexion. I haven't been stopped and searched by police 25 times within a year because I am ginger, or casually assumed to be a threat, a criminal or a terrorist. I am not confronted by political parties and movements, some with democratically elected representatives, which would like to see me deported from the country or granted second-class citizenship.
Likewise, no one has been putting up posters recently calling for me to be executed for gingerness. There are no respected religious leaders telling me that my very existence is sinful and that I'm heading for an eternity in hell. Nobody wishes to bar me from marrying my partner, wherever and however we choose, because she has (peculiarly, I will be the first to admit) fallen in love with a ginger.
For that matter, if we ever did get married, neither she nor I have grown up in a world where I could be raped with impunity as the effective property of the non-ginger party. Nobody would have ever denied me a mortgage under my own name, as happened during our parents' generation, or asked to talk to the non-ginger of the house about technical or mechanical matters. I haven't heard any politicians or newspaper headlines, this week or any other, assume that if one of us stays at home to look after the kids it will inevitably be the redhead.
Racism, sexism and homophobia are not just woven into the fabric of our history, they are living dynamics in our culture, even in our economy. They are, to greater or lesser extents, systematic and institutional in most aspects of life and the struggles to remove them are intrinsic to wider political battles over the very nature of our society, public policy and economic system. In that light, I would not hesitate to add disablism to the list of systematic oppressions.
After finally breaking free of the shackling language of "cripples" and "invalids" and securing the legal rights to access work and social participation, disabled people now face a twin-pronged, co-ordinated attack from politicians and press, who demonise them as scroungers and malingerers while snapping thread after thread of the safety net which keeps many out of abject poverty, squalor and indignity. That is institutional discrimination and oppression of the most shameful kind. To even suggest redhaired people face similar issues is insulting, verging on the obscene.
Anti-ginger prejudice and bullying is real and harmful, but the idea that it equates to these systems of oppression is fundamentally flawed. It assumes that all forms of prejudice and discrimination are equal and occurring in the same context when they really do not. It assumes that all forms of discrimination are the products of individual bigotry and irrational prejudice rather than structural and institutional divides.
Ally Fogg



"Certainly, working with young people, it is an issue that comes up again and again. We have had cases where they have gone to the extent of dying their hair jet black or another colour to escape the abuse. We have also had young girls coming in for group sessions in which they will not take off their hats the entire time. If you look at any school now in towns and cities across the country, the diversity will be huge. It is quite disturbing that despite that diversity, and the amazing work going on to celebrate it, there are still these issues. There is no logic to this. It is ingrained in some part of our folklore."
Claude Knights

"Childhood can fuzz into a set of fudged impressions, but I would be surprised if the colour of my hair wasn’t brought up almost every single day for great swathes of my younger years. I’d frequently be called Ginger or Carrot Top by other pupils and at some point during my journey through an all-boys school, Ginger evolved into an altogether more aggressive-sounding Ginga with a hard G. The most creative refrain was Duracell – a reference to a battery’s rusty top."
Matthew Stadlen

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- O'Regan, K. (2014). Red hair in popular culture and the relationship with anxiety and depression. Cork: B.A. Thesis
- Thorne, T. (2011). The 100 Words that Make the English. London: Abacus.
- photographs of Senta Berger via and via and via

"My Favourite Colour Was Yellow"

“It was when I had enough pink clothes that I could do a whole pink wash [in the laundry], that it made me think there’s something really powerful happening here and I want to trace where it had come from.” 
Kirsty Mackay

"My family is exactly the same as all these families in the book. We're all navigating our way through this sea of pink."
Kirsty Mackay



"The title places an emphasis on a lack of choice, and that's really what's at the core of the book."
Kirsty Mackay

Kirsty Mackay is a British photographer who started the project "My Favourite Colour Was Yellow" after the first pink laundry load. She did not buy pink items for her daughter and nevertheless found "her life inundated by pink" after giving birth to her in 2006. First, she took pictures of her daughter, then of her daughter's friends and of people she met on the street. The title "My Favourite Colour Was Yellow" is a quote from one of the girls she had photographed. The girl told her that once she had been asked by a friend what her favourite colour was and that she lied because of the pressure to conform. So she said pink instead of yellow. In Mackay's photographs, pink is more than a colour, a symbol of what society expects of young females and what finally becomes "a fact of life". (via)



"Over the past 9 months I have been working on a series of photographs exploring the current prevalence of the colour pink. Girl's clothing, toys and accessories are produced predominantly in pink, to the extent that it can be difficult to find an alternative. As a parent of a young daughter I became aware of the vast amounts of pink products being marketed directly to girls. This was not the case when I was growing up. The 1970's were a much more gender neutral time. In comparison to the 2010's they now seem more progressive. This back step has urged me to to document the current situation."
Kirsty Mackay



Some excerpts from an interview:

What is your latest project My Favourite Colour Was Yellow about, and what inspired you to make such project?

My latest project (...) is about how the colour pink has become so dominant in young girls’ lives. The title refers to the lack of choice out there.
I started the work after my daughter was born. I was aware of all the pink stuff, didn’t particularly like it and so didn’t buy into it. It was when, despite this we were still inundated with pink things, that I realised how powerful this had become. I needed to trace where it had come from. My own experience of growing up in the 70’s was vastly different. There was no pink. I was dressed in dungarees and boiler suits, played with Mecanno and Lego. I was definitely allowed to make my own choices. (via)



Why do you think it is a bad thing that pink is so strongly associated with femininity?

I think many people will overlook this issue and see it as harmless. But what worries me is that girls are being dictated to, they are not free to make their own decisions. It has now become difficult to find alternatives to pink in the UK, as the market is so saturated with it. I am constantly reading how not enough girls are choosing science, there are not enough woman Members of Parliament and female CEOs – well it starts here, when girls are young. Pink places an emphasis on how girls look – this is out of date and not what many parents want. Ultimately the people that benefit from this are the retailers and manufacturers, who make profits, but don’t question the ethics. (via)



Was any of the girls you met particularly obsessed with the color pink?

All of the girls I photographed were just ordinary girls. I wouldn’t say any were obsessed with pink. Some of the girls loved pink, most of the girls would say it was their favourite colour and a few of them didn’t like it, mostly the older ones. Despite this there was still always enough pink things for me to make a picture. (via)



Please share with us a little bit about your creative process for My Favourite Colour Was Yellow.

One of the biggest challenges for me was to find a way of photographing such a sweet subject matter that was still going to be interesting. (...)
The other aspect I found difficult was how could I go into other people’s houses and photograph their children, when I might be disagreeing with their decisions. I think also being a parent and being faced with the same problems, helped here. When I realised that we were all in the same situation that made it easier for me. I had to be very sensitive to the girls’ own opinions. They were often very proud to show me their bedrooms and have their portrait taken. I had to respect that and tried to give them that space for them to come across in the picture.
I’d say the portraits of the girls are all about them, my opinions stayed out of those shots. Towards the end of the project I really felt like I wouldn’t be doing the book justice if it was just a document of this time, it needed my opinion in there too. And the book as a whole expresses my feelings about all of this. I added some more shots that I made with my daughter and my friends daughter, which reflected more of what I was trying to express. (via)



(Below:) "Some pictures you struggle with and eventually get the shot and then others are like a gift. This was one of those occasions when I was handed a gift. I had met these girls and their mum at my daughter’s school. They are twins, and I asked if I could come and photograph them. When I went to their house I saw the pink tv, pink piano, pink walls, bed, scooters everything. None of this had even been mentioned and this happened over and over in the project, when I was greeted by pink X-mas trees, play houses, carpets and walls – everything." (via)



photographs by Kirsty Mackay via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via

Clear as Black

“By looking at me you will not know what I am. I am white, but I am black. Slowly the personal side of this story kept gnawing at me more and more, and before I knew it this project was totally about me. Through this series, I discovered who I am genetically,”
Adriana Monsalve



Worldwide, Puerto Rico has the highest prevalence of albinism and Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome (a type of albinism with a bleeding tendency and lung disease that has also been studied most frequently among Puerto Ricans, observed in five of every six albinos in Puerto Rico). Not all people diagnosed with albinism show the "typical" and distinguishing traits such as light hair, skin and eyes.



“I came up with ‘Clear As Black’ because I felt it represented exactly what it was that I had been seeing for three months in Puerto Rico: white people that are black, and black people that are white and all the visual representations of that. In the same way, ‘Clear As Black,’ is telling about me.”
Adriana Monsalve



With her series "Clear As Black", Adriana Monsalve confronts her own "story of being classified based on looks" and aims to break away "from the narrative of seeing persons with albinism as 'other'".



“I wanted to highlighted (sic.) the fact that they are people before they are ‘albinos.’ They are people with a condition called albinism and they live interesting lives just like you and me, full of layers and puberty, and racism and prejudice and romance and academic achievements and religious views and break-ups and lust an family drama and everything that makes them a whole person.”
Adriana Monsalve



“I’ve always found the rule in photography about how you should not mix color photos with black and whites in a series to be silly. My story has so much to do with skin color and lack [thereof], so I am going at against that rule for my benefit and the benefit of the story.”
Adriana Monsalve



“That’s what this series is about: changing what the word ‘albino’ means, and ultimately taking it out of our lexicon. I am showing a broader more expansive narrative of what people with albinism look like.”
Adriana Monsalve



- photographs and information via
- Witkop et al., (1990). Albinism and Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome in Puerto Rico. Boletín de la Asociación Medica de Puerto Rico, 82(8), 333-339

Blue or Green? Culture, Language and Colours

According to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, culturally shared language experiences lead to shared ways of thinking. In other words, the individual's organisation of language is influenced by the way culture organises language. Much empirical attention has been paid to the question whether language influences encoding and categorisation of experiences such as colour perception (Chiu, 2011).



Languages structure and categorise colours differently which again can affect an individual's perception of colour. Empirically, not all the studies conducted so far support the linguistic relativity hypothesis. The more recent studies, in particular, are in favour of this hypothesis and show that when an individual uses the colour terms in a certain language to describe the colours, his or her memory of the colours may be influenced by the colour terms used in the very description (Chiu, 2011).



In their cross-cultural study, Kay and Kempton asked native speakers of English and speakers of Tarahumara (spoken in northern Mexico) to judge the perceptual distance among eight colour chips of varying shades of greenish blue and blueish green. As the categories "green" and "blue" are not distinguished in the Tarahumaran language - wheras they are in English - the results showed culture-bound differences in the perceived distances between colours: English-speaking participants systematically overestimated the distances between blue and green while the Tarahumara did not. In a second study, Kay and Kempton showed that the distances reported by the English-speaking participants agreed with the Tarahumara-speaking participants once the effects of linguistic encoding had vanished by encoding each colour as "the bluer" and "the greener" one (Chiu, 2011, Kay & Kempton, 1984).



As predicted by the linguistic relativity hypthesis, the linguistic difference between green/blue and siyóname produced a difference in the perceived distance between colours. Colours near the green/blue-boundary were pushed apart by English speakers because of their concept of green and blue (Kay & Kempton, 1984).
For a discussion of the link between language, colour perception and right vs. left hemisphere see e.g. Gilbert et al. or Regier & Kay.



Chiu, C. (2011). Language and Culture. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 4(2) via
Kay, P. & Kempton, W. (1984) What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? American Anthropologist, New Series, 86(1), 65-79
Regier, T. & Kay, P. (2009) Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right. Trends in Cognitive Science, 13(19), 439-446
Photo from Clairol ad (around 1966) via, photo of Audrey Hepburn via, photo of mousing fox by Richard Peters (Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012) via, photo of Audrey wearing "China blue" dress by Givenchy taken by Bert Stern (1963) via