I read an interesting article today about why Thai women are spending lots of money and indeed pain to get a whiter butt. Now it is often true that a Thai women's butt is often quite a bit darker than her face, arms and legs. Some of this is heredity and part is due to the off the shelf whitening products that Thai women are addicted to. Blacks have a different issue in that the palms and soles are much lighter that the rest of their skin.
Buying sun tan lotion is Thailand to aid in getting a nice tan is a waste of time. The reason is the high SPF rating as well as the fact that the product almost always contains whitening agents! The reason Thai women and some Thai men use these products is because HiSo Thais are almost always light skinned and LoSo Thais are invariably darker because they work outdoors and can not afford the whitening products. The famous Isaan girls that farangs like are always darker skinned and no HiSo Thai male would be seen with them.
When you watch Thai television, the news people and the soap stars are always white skinned and mostly Thai Chinese. Most of these folks would also have had a nose job. The only place you see dark skinned Thais are as comedians to be laughed at.
Is there white privilege in Thailand? You bet, but the HiSo Thais just view it as the way society should be and the regular Thais just get on with business earning their 300 baht a day.
However, back in the great white north (Canada), I am not so sure White Privilege exists. It it does, tell that to the young white male trying to get into the police force or a career as a fire fighter. They are butting their heads up against a quota system based on gender and identifiable minorities. Of course this quota system exists for other careers such as trying to get into a Faculty of Medicine and having x spots reserved for minorities.
Maybe White Privilege did exist but watching Canadian Parliament on my new IPTV system it appears that Parliament may be over represented by minorities, partially due to our riding system and the fact that minorities seem to all want to live together in the same area.
White Male Privilege is even worse IMHO as universities approach 70% female enrollment. The K-12 educational system is over represented with females and the end result of that is now playing out in society. In particular how males are portrayed on television as fools and idiots really bothers me. One particular example is the 4 males drinking beers and eating snack food, can't seem to locate the remote to turn the TV on, and the female (nicely represented as a minority) walks into the room, locates the remote and walks off smugly. If this add was reversed there would be outrage.
Randall Denley wrote an interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen in 2016
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/denley-is-canada-really-dominated-by-white-privilege
Here is an excerpt from it:
White privilege is generally defined as special advantages given to people simply because they are white. Whites help other whites, the story goes, keeping others on the fringes. Yes, people can point to black, East Indian or Chinese people who have succeeded in pretty much every area of Canadian society, but look how many more good jobs and powerful positions are held by white people.
It’s not surprising that white people would dominate many spheres of activity in Canada. They make up about 80 per cent of the population and their families have typically been here far longer than those of immigrants from non-white parts of the world. Among G8 countries, Canada has by far the largest percentage of its population born elsewhere, at 20.6 per cent.
If the big priority for white people was maintaining their supposed white privilege, why would Canada be admitting so many non-white immigrants? And why would we have federal laws encouraging employment of visible minorities and human rights commissions to help protect them? In Canada, we even fuss because the top people at our spy agency are not sufficiently diverse
In Thailand, non Thai people of all colors and races are discriminated against but Bangkok is the number 1 tourist destination in the world as is the country. I guess the phrase, 'Would you like some racism with your vacation?' seems appropriate. It does not seem to staunch the flow of tourists. I don't object to being a farang .. after all, it is not my country, I merely live here and accept it for what it is.
TTYL
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