The first step to preventing an incident like George Floyd’s murder lies in our own heads: reflecting on racism in our day-to-day lives.
Darkie toothpaste was the very first grown-up toothpaste I ever used.
I was quite small then. I remember asking my dad why the toothpaste was named Darkie, when surely the point of using it was to get bright white teeth.
In response, my dad pointed at the picture on the toothpaste box. It was the face of a black man in a top hat, tux and bowtie. Eyes popped wide open, he was grinning maniacally to show a mouthful of spectacularly white, rectangular teeth.
“His teeth look so white because his face is so black,” Dad explained. “It’s called contrast. Black makes white look whiter.”
I thought the explanation made perfect sense for a toothpaste. So I was surprised when, a few years later, Darkie changed its name.
What was the problem with Darkie?
Darkie was Darkie when it was manufactured by Hawley & Hazel, based in Hong Kong. It was called Darkie because someone in the company was an Al Jolson fan. Who was Al Jolson? The quickest answer is that he was a white comedian known for being the “king of blackface”. Nope, not a lot of reflecting on racism here.
When US-based Colgate-Palmolive acquired Hawley & Hazel in 1985, it was horrified by Darkie, so much so that it wanted to can the brand. However, it settled for renaming the toothpaste. As a result, Darkie toothpaste became Darlie toothpaste in 1989.
I was still a kid when I first saw Darlie toothpaste on the supermarket shelves. The black man in the top hat had turned into a white man in a top hat, drawn in a black-and-white chiaroscuro style to preserve contrast, and he now wore a very moderate, genteel sort of smile.
By then, I was old enough to realize that Darkie was a racist word, but inexperienced enough to wonder what the big deal was. Being Singaporean, I didn’t know any black people (and hence, in my childish mind, could not possibly be racist!). I had Indian friends, but I had never felt the slightest inclination to call them, or anyone else, Darkies. I still remembered my dad’s explanation for the name and nothing about it struck me as racist.
What made the change even more pointless was the Chinese name of the stuff: hei ren ya gao. Ya gao means toothpaste. Hei ren means black person (or people – Chinese words don’t have plural forms). The Chinese name has never changed. It may have become Darlie toothpaste, but to date, it is still also hei ren ya gao – Black People’s Toothpaste.
And then, an enlightening incident
It wasn’t long after the Darlie rebranding exercise that I witnessed the incident that opened my eyes to the casual cruelty of unthinking racism. I was in school, near the end of a class, with the teacher in a relaxed and chatty mood.
The teacher, who was Chinese and quite young, said, with the air of telling a joke, “Did you know that Malay people are called babi?”
Most of us twenty-odd kids in the class, most of us also Chinese, did not. Probably because it wasn’t true.
“Do you know what babi means?”
Again, most of us did not.
Giggling slightly, the teacher said, “It means pig!”
Whereupon all eyes swivelled to lock on our one and only Malay classmate. The girls sitting around her started giggling too.
“Hello babi,” they said to her. “You’re a babi!”
Unsurprisingly, she was in tears by the time the bell rang.
Moral of the story: racism starts small
It is so easy to hurt someone based on attributes they cannot help having. It can happen fast. And we don’t even need to mean to hurt them.
All we need is an authority figure saying that it’s OK to call Malay people pigs, or a commercial product saying that it’s OK to call black people Darkies. Without reflecting on racism, without stopping to think about what effect that could have, that’s what we end up doing.
It’s frightening how much like sheep we can be.
From there, it’s not a very big step to labeling a whole group of people as stupid, or dirty, or unscrupulous, or unworthy. Not so hard to feel indignant if a ching chong or a kike lands a university spot or a prime job in an area where they are minorities.
Bump that up to population level and let some years pass. With enough momentum, there will be disparities in education, opportunities, daily interactions and even healthcare, based on the race one happens to be.
And then, someone like Derek Chauvin who kills someone like George Floyd.
And then, a country in flames.
The first step: reflecting on racism
Granny Weatherwax is one of my favorite characters by one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett. One of my favorite things she said was:
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.”
That’s exactly what racism does. It reduces people to animals or caricatures or stereotypes. In this way, the racist justifies their own feeling of being just naturally better, more powerful, more gifted, more blessed.
Martin Luther King knew how seductive this ideology is, and how important that we work to recognize and resist it, as individuals and as a society. He said, in his 1967 ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech:
“One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
To my mind, restructuring begins with reflecting on, instead of blindly accepting, our ideas about people who are different from ourselves. Many of these ideas start out innocently enough – the picture on a toothpaste box, a joke shared by a teacher – but they can turn nasty, and fast, if we let them take root in our minds and propagate.
Black does make white look whiter, and white makes black look blacker. But these are just colors; these are just things.
People are different.
Do you have thoughts or a little story about day-to-day racism? Share them in the comments below!
