Deracializing the Self to Conform to the Other

I have been very interested in the topic of this week for a very long time now. When I was a little kid I watched a documentary on Asian-Americans taping their eyes to get a crease and how they based their appearance on this one tiny thing that I never even thought of as important before I saw the documentary. Ever since then I have realized through the extreme popularity of body modification on the most minor to the most major scales, along with the popularity of skin bleaching and color contact usage in minority communities for tactical reasons, how much both majority and minority groups base their appearance on societal norms.

The hatred of the self stems from a young age, which I believe Keeling or Rhodes brought up in the readings three weeks ago, when girls are brought up thinking that their difference is ugly. For Asian Women, their hatred is direct to their eyes which illustrate the “monotonous…‘Oriental girl’[‘s]…‘dilligen[ce]’…‘nimble fingers’ and…‘slow wit’”, as Eugenia Kaw states on page 80 of her article “Medicalization of Racial Features: Asian American Women and Cosmetic Surgery”. By thinking that their eyes are illustrative of this cultural stereotype, Asian women are led to believe that they must change their appearance because the ideas of “the notion that Asian features are inadequate” (Medicalization p. 81) are so ingrained in culture that it is impossible for them to envision a successful future with their current looks. It is the perpetuation of these ideas that makes these women to do what they do in order to break the association with their stereotype. Instead of trying to break the cultural stereotypes in other ways, they break away from their Asian features in order to assimilate with American culture to attain success and freedom that White women have; however, these women aren’t conforming to Americanness per se, they are “conform[ing] to certain standards of beauty” (Medicalization p. 79) which just so happens to be the stereotypical American look. By conforming to American standards of beauty, they are making it easier for them to have the All-American life by attaining “‘symbolic capital’…in the form of a look that holds more prestige” (Medicalization p. 78.)

At first I wondered why, instead of trying to attain cultural and symbolic capital in ways such as education and mannerisms, these women went for the more drastic option; however, I realized that America has its idea of beauty ingrained into both White Americans and Hyphenated Americans and that to many, it seems impossible to break into a successful area without buying into this vision of beauty that is internalized at birth. While America is not as racially segregated as it was in the past, it is still very much segregated by who has beautiful features and who doesn’t; however, since the beautiful look is often thought of to be the classic All-American look, beauty segregation can be looked at as racial segregation, just in a more expensive coat.