How long does it take to change an image?

I have this distinct “core memory” from kindergarten. I’m about five years old, like most other kids in my class. I like playing on the swings and growing my collection of stickers, like most kids in my class. I am brown, not like most kids in my class. In fact, not like any kids in my class. My one friend at that point is a sweet white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. And for some reason, liking her is much easier for everyone than liking me. So I go home and ask my mom, “Why can’t I have blonde hair and blue eyes? Would people like me more if I did?” 

Her answer about the melanin in our skin and how we are less likely to get skin cancer is somehow easier to understand than the construct of race. Somehow, the cold, hard science feels easier to grasp than the feeling of being an outsider in my own class.

Growing up in my specific southern Californian suburb meant that this pattern would find itself repeating again and again. As the lone Indian throughout most of my school years, my every day, 8 am to 3 pm friend groups were a lot more creamer than caramel, so much so that some people joked that we should start a podcast called “Four and a Half White Girls.” It actually made sense though because, like the “half” that I was dubbed, I always found myself in the near background of a pretty white girl. It was like someone was using portrait mode and I just happened to be more fit for the blur than the focus. I was never the right fit to be desired. I would wait to be noticed and loved, but next to the pretty white girls, my turn would never come. I didn’t realize when I became the quirky best friend in my own story. 

Somewhere within this “All American” suburbia, I found that my desire to be seen, heard, and loved by white people was rooted more in fear than anything else. Rooted in a need to be seen as a friend - not a foe, a smile - not a threat. The subtle coexistence of the joy of doing things with your friends while knowing that you would be treated very differently walking down the streets two blocks up from your house. As much as your “inner white girl” strives to experience uninhibited joy, your outer brown girl will never get to match that level of freedom.

I could blame being Indian for this, but after that brief blip in kindergarten, I never wished to change who I was. I never hated my culture. I never intentionally distanced myself from my mother tongue, never tried to wash out the colors or clothes of my people, and never shied away from the aromas and tastes of that “home.” I had many Indian friends thanks to the temple community I grew up in, people who I didn’t have to explain myself to. Between these friends and taking Hindi classes, learning Bharathanatyam and celebrating Indian festivals, I was instilled with a love of my identity that only grew stronger with age. My community was my safety net to fall on, even if sometimes I took them for granted in my effort to impress others. 

I wore being brown like a badge of honor and invited people to experience it with me. I invited non-Indian friends to celebrate festivals with me at my home and in college, made them Indian food, and taught them Indian dances for school talent shows. An ambassador of my culture, I worked to make myself easy to understand and digest. I worked to build the bridge that is the hyphen between my Indian and American identity, to honor each part. But when both halves of your whole are obsessed with the same images and standards of beauty, even your own bridge can’t save you from drowning. 

Jumping five years forward from that five-year-old self, an Indian woman at a party pulled me aside to tell me that if I put cow's milk on my face, it would help lighten my complexion and help with acne. A couple of years later, my grandmother suggested I use the controversial Fair and Lovely skin-lightening cream. As part of an Indian community living in America, they kept pushing me to subscribe to this fairness-centric narrative of beauty. The British may have eventually left India, but they left many of their colonial thought processes behind. All of my college application essays started with “I grew up as a mixture of Hollywood and Bollywood...” But unfortunately for me, both have had such pervasive colorism that there was no way to feel beautiful as a brown woman.

Until late in my high school years, I had not seen a brown woman being portrayed as someone desirable in Western media. Every lead of every romance movie, every girl that the guy fell for would inevitably be white. It took years of working on myself, coupled with the 2020s bloom of Mindy Kaling shows and Season 2 of Bridgerton, to realize that I was beautiful. I cry tears of joy everytime I see a brown woman being the love interest in a movie, seeing myself in her and thinking that maybe one day I could be like her. 

A minority rising into spaces of visibility is seen as a threat to those whose power is rooted in their invisibility. A brown woman in a spotlight receives both love and hate, the latter often louder. Take Avantika and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. When they were playing roles written for Indian girls, they were praised because “representation matters”. But the same two were targetted as “curry munchers” who would “ruin Tangled” in response to a fan casting of a movie that hasn’t even been announced. We are only digestible when we stay in our lane.

Sometimes I feel like a sell-out for wanting to be liked by white people. I can feel my internal colonization despite everything I do to combat it in the world outside. I can feel the uphill battle I am fighting to be desired in a system that does not want me to be seen or loved. The world loves the brown woman’s cuisine, “tan,” and clothing but not her body, mind, and heart. The internet is flooded with new ways of cooptation, a digital capitalist colonialism living vibrantly in the way my food with turmeric is mocked but their golden latte sells for $6. It permeates from the past of colonial stolen goods and into the present when our dupattas are pinned to Pinterest boards as “Scandinavian scarves.” If only our people were as valued as our makeup and spices. On the same internet, you’ll see so many videos with a stunning brown girl and her white boyfriend, followed by vitriolic comments saying they don’t know how she bagged him. 

As powerful as the new generations of South Asian creatives who are rewriting the stories are, they are fighting against centuries of narratives that we were never in or never desired in. Some people say that it helps to show others who you are in their life, that you are their doctor, lawyer, engineer, favorite actor, teacher, friend, etc. That you need to “humanize” yourself to them. And for a long time, I think that’s what I was subconsciously doing. I was giving them reason after reason for why they could like me, love me even. But why would you need to humanize someone who is already a human? To get someone to love and respect and desire you despite your ethnicity? But like Elizabeth says in Pride and Prejudice, no one wants to be loved by someone against their better judgment.

So my question is, how long does it take for an image to change? How long will it take for a brown woman to be desired in a non-fictional America, not because she is “exotic” or “desperate” but because she is as worthy of love as anyone else? How long will it take for little brown girls in kindergarten to feel comfortable in their skin? How long will it take to normalize a brown woman being loved?