Ok so as a naturally quite tanned white woman who, in my living memory, has ever insulted the colour of someone else's skin (taken the piss out of people with sunburn but that's beside the point), is me sitting out in the sun tanning, because my skin tans easily and I like looking tan and enjoy sitting in the sun, is it racist? Or should I just avoid sitting in the sun all together?
Here’s the problem tho I’m not saying that tanning is unacceptable (which you would know if you’d actually read some of my other asks). I’m saying getting fake tans is unacceptable. Even for a role where a character is an outdoorsy person. Fake tans are part of an industry and the beauty industry is notoriously racist. So much so that for the vast amount of women of color we’re always held to white standards.
Problem is tans aren’t just something that were recently fashionable, they were something quite noticeable that distinguished different classes from one another.
Take your comment about, “taken the piss out of people with sunburn” like objectively speaking there’s a historical precedent even in literature where people with sunburns are automatically deemed of a lower class.
That sort of classism was a deliberate part of white supremacy and still is. You’ve taken the piss out of people for having a sunburn. I’m not saying you’re a bad person but because I’m Mexican I couldn’t even tell people when I had a skin disease that I’d get a sunburn or they’d laugh at me or insult me. Like I feel that tans have become fashionable for white people without any regard for the classism that it used to entail. Yet for many white people, when I went to school with them, they got sunburned as the first step of being tanned.
A tan is not insulting not really if you’ve actually gotten one naturally. Getting a fake tan and darkening ones skin artificially through spray tans and makeup is offensive to me.
