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By: Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman 
This April, TV personality Bianca Gonzalez unwittingly turned her 6-month-old daughter, Lucia, into a cause celebre after posting a picture of her baby on Instagram. The low-angle shot shows a cute little foot connected to a cute little leg several shades darker than lily white. Online trolls took to the comments, bashing Lucia for being morena and Ms. Gonzalez’s supporters for being deluded “fantards.”
The 33-year-old social media influencer, who has 5.17 million followers on Twitter and 1.5 million followers on Instagram, went into Mama-Bear mode and hit back against the negativity. “The past few days have been so eye-opening to find out that so many people are still bullied for being maitim (dark). It’s 2016, huy! Naniniwala ka pa rin ba na ‘mas maganda’ ang maputi kaysa sa maitim?” (Do you still believe that white is more beautiful than black?),” said Ms. Gonzalez in an April 26 post that has garnered 35,000 likes as of writing. 
Yes, Ms. Gonzalez, it is 2016, but there are still people like Hannah Reyes, 23, who are willing to go through pain for beauty — tiis-ganda in colloquial parlance. Ms. Reyes, who works in the human resource department of a private company, pops a glutathione whitening pill in the morning and washes her face with papaya whitening soap. This ritual isn’t cheap: each bottle of glutathione pills, which she buys from Japan, costs P3,000 and lasts her a month. “I don’t mind spending a lot to get a fairer, smoother skin,” she said. “It boosts my confidence.
The hankering for lighter skin is so intense that it fuels an entire industry of whitening elixirs, soaps, pills, and treatments. According to Jia Salindong-Du, country leader for personal care at Procter & Gamble (P&G), the majority of P&G’s clients are women, particularly Millennials who have just entered the workforce. These young “first-jobbers,” said Ms. Salindong-Du, feel that fair skin increases their chances of success. Addressing the needs of this market, P&G recently launched Olay’s Skin Whitening Bar, which uses a rose extract from Egypt, said to whiten and even out skin tone. The whitening soap costs P46 per 90-gram bar. Other soaps that promise the same effect range in price from P34 to P350 a bar. 
Beauty, it should be noted, is a booming business in the Philippines. A study released last year by Kantar Worldpanel Philippines showed that consumption of personal care items grew by 11% from June 2014 to 2015, outpacing other categories such as household products (7%), food (6%), and beverages (5%). “This growth is a clear manifestation of the Filipino shoppers’ high regard for hygiene and beauty products,” Lourdes Deocareza, Kantar Worldpanel Philippines’ new business development head, said in a statement.
‘TO BE DIVINE IS TO BE WHITE’
Understanding the desire to be white — and the trolls who dissed baby Lucia’s skin color — requires a look back at history. The wish to have a lighter complexion, after all, is nothing new — just read Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, written in 1887, which featured the character Doña Victorina, a social climber who powdered her face heavily in her attempt to look more Spanish.
“Spanish colonialism demarcated those with wealth, power, and authority (or success in broad terms) and those without the same power and authority,” said Dr. Ricardo Abad, chairperson of the Ateneo de Manila University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, in an e-mail interview. 
“Wealth, power, and authority also imbued its possessors with cultural capital so the possession of social graces, elegance, literacy, and a cosmopolitan outlook, to name a few, rested on those in society’s upper echelons. It also happened, however, that those with power and authority were largely white-skinned and those without these qualities were largely dark-skinned. And since that social stratification lasted for centuries without much challenge, it was fairly easy to ingrain in people’s mind that skin color (and maybe texture as well) is associated with success, or being on top of the social heap.”
The Catholic religion that the Spanish brought to the country with them also ingrained upon us a penchant for white, which we equate with divinity, said Mr. Abad. “Jesus, his mother Mary, his stepfather Joseph, and all the saints and angels in heaven were white,” he pointed out.
“So added to the association between skin color and success, as pointed out earlier, comes this layer of divinity. To be wealthy and powerful is to be white. To be divine, or approximate standards of the divine, is to be white as well. 
“And if you can’t be white, the next best thing is to associate with matters white. Wealth, power, and religion are mighty forces to beat, and if for these reasons alone, difficult to budge.”
And so, for much of Philippines modern history, the epitome of feminine beauty was the mestiza — with sharp features, prominent nose, and, most especially, pale skin — as seen by the great silver screen beauties of the 1950s like Gloria Romero and Susan Roces. Save for a blip in the 1970s and ’80s — when kayumanggi (brown) beauties like singer Nora Aunor, actress Tetchie Agbayani, and beauty queen Gloria Diaz came to the fore — paragons of Philippine beauty have been overwhelmingly fair-skinned.
“The American invasion only helped sustain the skin color-success notion,” said Ateneo’s Mr. Abad. “The Americans who came asserted white power and its racist policies at home and abroad only serve to demonstrate the might of the white. That the Americans made their presence in the Philippines actively felt after the 1946 Independence strengthens this attachment in the post-war period,” he said.
“The Americans reinforced these notions with images of popular culture, and in particular Hollywood culture. The American cinema invaded the Philippines (and the world) and with it another set of glamorous iconic figures, females and males, who became the new epitomes of success. The large majority of these Hollywood superstars were white and reinforced to the Filipinos the connection learned during Spanish times — that skin color and success were highly correlated. Add to this the perceived superiority of anything ‘Made in USA’ and again you have an attachment to whiteness that is both material and non-material.”
‘WHITE IS MIGHT’
Today, neighboring countries such as South Korea, Japan, and China, have become purveyors of the idea that “white is might.”
Consider the current crop of East Asian pop stars and actors who look like they’re made from delicate porcelain. Consider, too, the cosmetics brands that are making inroads in the Philippine market: Etude House, Tony Moly, Innisfree, Laneige, Holika Holika, Majolica Majorca, K-Pallete, Dolly Wink, Shiseido, and Shu Uemura, among many others. Many of their products, especially the BB and CC creams and emulsions, promise a whiter, smoother, and blemish-free face.
“All these countries have attracted us with their versions of success, popularity, fame, material strength. It again happens that for the most part, the images of success from these places also feature white faces. Korea has even gone the way of sculpting skin and face to make it appealing for show biz, and the standards of sculpting entail making the face white. The success of the Chinese in finance and business also adds to the power of whiteness. There is a gender bias here, too, as females have more pressure than males to be white — and I think this has to do with the association between females and purity, meaning that we are back to the religious roots of whiteness that I mentioned earlier,” Mr. Abad said.
With this kind of historical precedent behind “white is might,” the Ateneo professor doesn’t see a sudden shift in our mind-set happening. “Not in the near future. But there’s no stopping anyone from campaigning that ‘Dark is Beautiful.’ Groups have tried before to no avail. But the effort must go on,” he said.
#PROUDMORENA
The effort starts with individual acceptance. There are Filipinas who, like Ms. Gonzalez, have learned to embrace, with love and pride, their year-round summer skin, and see no correlation between skin color and success.
“I have to be frank, I’ve had my fair share of insecurities during my adolescence. When you get teased and bullied a lot, who wouldn’t? Naïve and young, I thought I didn’t fit the beauty standards of Filipinos because I wasn’t ‘kutis mayaman’ (“rich skinned,” meaning “pale skinned”). I thought whitening lotions and soaps would save me from further ridicule. Spoiler alert: none of them worked,” said Erika Dizon, 25, a special features writer in BusinessWorld.
“Growing up morena (dark), I’ve probably experienced all sorts of rude and gratuitous jokes or comments about my skin tone. The most memorable one happened a few summers ago, when an older lady offered to sponsor glutathione sessions for me. She said. ‘Maganda ka,’ then murmured, ‘maitim ka lang.’” (You are pretty, it’s just that you are dark.) The road to acceptance was never easy, she said. “The only solution, it dawned on me, was to live with it. Living with it was easy. Loving it is a different narrative.”
Mary Inolino, 29, a freelance digital designer, has the same issues. Born with morena skin, she was called many names. But as she learned to accept her natural color, people started complimenting her look and aura. She currently has a foreign boyfriend and is happy with her life. “What does skin color have to do with success?” she said.
Like Mlles. Dizon and Inolino, Ms. Gonzalez had to endure being taunted long before Lucia was born: she was bullied and called “negra” (black) when she was 10 years old. “Huwag na huwag ma-pressure na magpaputi dahil hindi mo kailangan ’yan, maganda ang kulay mo (Do not give in to pressure to whiten because you do not need that, your color is beautiful). To parents, siblings, best friends, special someone of anyone being bullied for being dark, reassure them that their color is beautiful and they need not be fairer to be appreciated. Whether you’re born with dark or fair skin, embrace your color and be proud of it. Wala sa kulay ng balat ’yung halaga mo bilang tao; nasa pakikisama mo at kung paano mo ibinabahagi ’yung talents mo na mahalaga (Your worth as a human being is not dictated by the color of your skin; it is in your friendliness and how you use your talents that is important). Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts and comments, nakakatuwa na madaming#proudmorena!!!! (it makes me happy that there are so many #proudmorena),” her Instagram post read.
With hope, Lucia will grow up in a less white-obsessed world.
Ms. Dizon agreed and said, “For everyone out there, especially the young girls, don’t believe in everything you see or read on billboards and magazines. Brown is not ‘dull,’ neither is yellow, white, or black. Beauty knows no color so wear your skin confidently. Trust me.”
At the end of the day, to remain morena or to become a modern Snow White is an individual’s choice. What matters more is deeper than one’s skin color. In this day and age of social media, it is easy to make judgments based on superficial physical attributes. Perhaps, it’s a matter of minding our own business.