Apparently the Miss Universe contestant from Denmark, Gitte Hanspal is half-Indian. Does this matter, besides the fact that it proves to the doubters that there are Indians in Denmark? No. I just needed the thinnest of reasons to put this picture up [tip from Pooja Makhijani]. The Miss Universe contest will be on May 31st in Thailand.
Occupation: I am currently working part-time as a student at IBM Software. My job is to assist the sales staff in different areas and on different projects, in order to relieve their workload.
She’s beautiful AND on her way to becoming and IT geek. Oh, and please let’s not forget about Miss India, Amrita Thapar.
Ummm – it’s the Dutch who have the wooden shoes (and ice skates, windmills, dykes, doobage and red light district). The Danes have … I dunno, a viking past?
I’m sure Abhi’s doing a version of the Austria/Australia joke from Dumb and Dumber. Right, Abhi? 😉
What Ennis said.
Lego. Hans Christian Andersen. A Cool History of defying Nazis by all wearing yellow stars and having the king ride through the city on horseback. Moody Princes and Something Rotten. An International Court America has hobbled. And apparently really big dogs.
Yeah, I would call it More than Just Lego.
To be Denmark or not to be Denmark, that is the question.
miss norway is half-thai.
I knew there was something rotten …
Personally, I’m rooting for Ms. Germany:
not south asian related, but the japanese contestant is 6’1. WTF?!?!? Wow.
india can stand tall and proud, its delegate is whiter looking than half-nordic miss denmark.
Here’s Sri Lanka; also possibly part-desi: Mauritius, Netherlands.
Razib: I never knew it was a contest to see which country had the whitest women. If I had known, I would have entered Michael Jackson as the US entry.
Seriously, “tall and proud” !?!?! You’re giving your harshest critics a whole depotload of ammunition with that freudian slip.
Ummm – it’s the Dutch who have the wooden shoes (and ice skates, windmills, dykes, doobage and red light district). The Danes have … I dunno, a viking past?
I looked this up specifically before posting. I know that Holland is most famous for its wooden shoes (when I was a kid my parents brought back wooden shoes from there), but Denmark makes them also (Google it). It was a stretch, but the fact that Denmark isn’t known for anything really (here comes trouble) made me take a chance 🙂
Here’s Sri Lanka; also possibly part-desi: Mauritius, Netherlands.
Good catch Manish. In order to be consistent I should have pointed out the other South Asian contestants. That would mean going through all of them though. Why would I flip through a bunch of beauties to do a thorough job?
huh? what ammunition? i check out these boards and sometimes get the impression from some that USA is chock-full-of-racists opressin’ us browns, but i see the bollywood movies my sister watches and see white-women in mild brown-face (some of this i gather is brown-women in mild white-face actually, but same diff). my personal aesthetic preferences lean toward blonde and leggy, i’m straight up about it, and i don’t give a shit if you want to go freudian over every personal preference that makes one happy. all that being said, i really don’t want to hear all this crap how racist america is when the beauty ideals in a nation of 1 billion (+300 pakistani and bangladeshi fellow travellers) mostly dark brown-skinned people leans toward a mediterranean olive ideal.*
now, when i asked a left-wing indian acquaintance of mine (who asked me seriously if i had to deal with lynchings and what not) about the bizarro tendency he simply told me, “look, you don’t have ugly people on american TV, so we don’t have dark people in the movies” (he himself on the black side of “wheatish”). there are dark-skinned people in these movies of course, but when my sister was watching this film i noted that the main dark-skinned character (of a hue far closer to the south asian median than the lead actors) was grinning in a simian fashion constantly and doing the comic relief schtick. great. at least chris rock and chris tucker do the bug-eye thang with some verbal acrobatics.
p.s. when my white friends who watch bollywood (i guess it’s cool or chic) ask me straight up why the actors look so white, i kind of shrug (i don’t really watch that stuff), but at this point i just smile and say brown people dig the brown as much as i do i guess 😉
They don’t look white, of course, even if they’re olive-skinned (bigger eyes, different features). What your friends mean is ‘why don’t they look like the starving people I see on TV’ 😉
well, it is a fair enough point that most south asian actors are obviously part of the south asian phenotypic range. but, they do draw from one particular part of the phenotype pool. that is fine of course…but this sort of stuff isn’t as to dismiss by saying that this is part of the normal south asian range-punjabis and kashmiri women are noted for their “beauty” people they tend to fit the moold better (and men for their masculine back hair). the whole “black is beautiful” movement in the USA was meant to address some of the issues that occurred because of the idealization of “yellow” (that is, mulatta) women among the black middle class, i think some of the same shit might need to go down with browns.
i will offer a personal example, to my whitified eyes my younger brother and i are about the same color. but, to bangladeshis apparently he is a touch darker. this results in some peculiar asymmetrical treatment. seeing as how i don’t like my brother, i am not totally against this, but seeing as how i think the whole color-coding thing is ridiculous (in the USA, i’m just brown).
basically, i get tired of colored folk (brown, black and yellow) talk of “white skin privilege” when there is a lot of “light skin privilege” being perpetuated in their own communities (speaking as a good-ole-wheatish-boy…i think?).
someone really should have edited Sri Lanka’s written answers for her… terrible!
Shakes head. What self-respecting engineer never played with LEGO?
If we ever meet in person, remind me to tell you the story about twisted DNA, Lego, and the Tabla player. Where by “you,” I mean any Sepia Mutineer.
fact that Denmark isn’t known for anything really
tycho brahe, hans christian anderson and hamlet.
let me conclude my night’s comments that i am simply mooting the possibility that a burkean imperfectibility of man is a human universal. there is often talk about the injustices of the west, historical and present, which i think is somewhat ironic in that i suspect that few commentors here are the children of the brown working class, but be as that may be, there tends to be an outcry when the there is a note that the pot is calling the kettle brown. perhaps olive-skin privilege is always going to be a structural feature of south asian society and/or culture. that might cause one to reflect on the the context of the injustices that we complain about now and then.*
p.s. check out the face book at globalbeauties.com. norwary, denmark, france and the netherlands have part or all non-white delegates to the miss universe contest. howz that for white skin privilege?
I was counting how many cheesecake posts y’all get up here, quite a bit, kinda of reminds me of Playboy (you know, where you tell your wife, girlfriend or coworkers that, “no, really, I read it for the articles”).
Yes, well, to get back to the point: in a riot, a wooden shoe works better than a chappal, aerodynamically-speaking.
These beauty contests are flawed. I hate to sound cliche, but beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. There are Indian girls at my university better looking than Aishwarya Rai chick that everybody’s makes such a big deal about… or at least I think so. In fact, I happen to think that the best looking Indian women have the darker wheat complexions and am therefore not into the whole “Bollywood Girl” look… but that’s just me.
Anyhow, from Razib’s face book link, I think it comes down between Antigua and Costa Rica, if you’re just going by looks that is.
basically, i get tired of colored folk (brown, black and yellow) talk of “white skin privilege” when there is a lot of “light skin privilege” being perpetuated in their own communities (speaking as a good-ole-wheatish-boy…i think?).
I agree. Though I suspect the obsession with light skin is recent phenomena atleast when South Indians are concerned. South Indian movies couple of decades down the lane had dark skinned heroines. However, it’s not all that depressing when it comes to my case. My father(reddish fair according to his proud kin) didn’t find anything wrong with my mother’s skin(a pure dark by any standards). His unbiased eyes might have seen her only as beautiful or educated. Nevertheless, his mother even now laments that he rejected a proposal of a very fair girl and married my mother instead. And like a good hindu she blames it on fate. So at least it’s not only males who are partial to fair skin. If you browse Malayalee matrimonials not infrequently you will see one of the criteria for the boy is light skin.
But the worst thing is that my 6-feet, dark skinned younger brother feels low about his body(I’m optimistically 5’8″). My tall-dark-handsome consolations have no effect on him. As one of my friends said, it’s only whatever-fair-whatever for Indians. In my opinion, the neo-fair shudras like me, who rarely get exposed to scorching sun, have fueled the craze for the light skin in South of Vindhyas. Though I guess situation is slowly improving in states like West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala as people are becoming more and more westernized.
razib
razib, I just want to say that I love you man. Anyone who can write a sentence that begins with ‘let me conclude my night’s comments that i am simply mooting the possibility that a burkean imperfectibility of man is a human universal’ right before they go to bed is a freakin genius. Most people are thinking of brushing their teeth and worrying if they are going to get any jig-jig from their wife or lover just before they hit the sack, but you have some top-of-the-range philosophical speculation going on there. I really hope that you win the Nobel Prize one day, you deserve it. I’m not being funny, I really love your posts. Its as though Spinoza was reincarnated as a Bengali geneticist, and you write about Sunny Leone too and her preference for doggy style and Italian food. But right before you go to bed you have this mad philosophical speculation. What does your mind do when its not in sleeper mode?
Genius, genius, genius.
why not Pakistani delegate?? Indonesia and Malaysia both have one.
On another note, the Colombian delegate said “One of my main interests is applying my acquired knowledge in Industrial Engineeering, especially in Supply Chain Management.” Some people like sports, others watch TV. She likes Supply Chain Management.
Shakes head. What self-respecting engineer never played with LEGO?
LEGOS are from Denmark? I didn’t know. I LIVED off of legos as a kid. Space legos to be specific. I tended to arm all the vehicles of science with extra weapons though.
tycho brahe, hans christian anderson and hamlet
Great Razib, but how am I supposed to work in a refernce to Tycho Brahe into the title? None of the contestants have a gold nose.
why not Pakistani delegate?? Indonesia and Malaysia both have one.
malaysia usually sends an ethnic chinese to the contest, not a muslim malay. miss indonesia has been subject to controversy, though since the title holder is named “arktika sarita devi” you assume she is of the moderate muslim majority than the orthodox santri muslim minority.
the miss bangladesh was cancelled in 1998 due to protests from muslim groups. many arab countries who send contestants send christians.
Great Razib, but how am I supposed to work in a refernce to Tycho Brahe into the title? None of the contestants have a gold nose.
i think it was actually copper. or so says wikipedia. 🙂
PB,
thanks for the compliments, but a few minor points
1) i’m not a geneticist, i’m an amateur at all i do.
2) there’s a lot of great stuff in the blogosphere. i think you are probably commenting on the range of the quality/tenor of my comments/posts as opposed to the median quality/tenor. that is, if i didn’t act like a doofus now and then i would probably amaze you a lot less with my references 😉
3) there has to be some irony in making an comparison to spinoza, the father of the enlightenment in many ways, after i made an allusion to edmund burke, a man who made his intellectual career dissing the enlightenment.
Ms. Netherlands, Sharita Sopacua, is of Indonesian origin. Of course, this doesn’t preclude her from having some desi in her cocktail. Poor girl is from Den Bosch in the southern part of Holland – BO-RING.
Bollywood’s representatives need not be reflective whiteboards or huddled masses yearning to breathe free smile How about a Ms. India who looks like one of the ladies flanking Ms. Thappar in this picture.
razib, your sexual preferences for “leggy blondes” are your business (i prefer dorky jewish intellectuals and happy fobby progressive desis myself and would one day like to branch out to really, really hot guys) but your broader analysis is frustrating. The two trends you’re pointing to are part of the same complex of ideas. You’re going to exempt 200 hundred years of western power and monopoly over the media, education, government, and power in trying to understand why desis (and Latinos and many others) are racist within their own communities?
yeah, there’s something universal about racism, xenophobia, etc. as well, but there’s a lot of it has to be rooted in the last couple of centuries. otherwise, how do you explain that ethiopian women, clearly the most beautiful women on earth, are so underrecognized.
“Bollywood’s representatives need not be reflective whiteboards or huddled masses yearning to breathe free smile How about a Ms. India who looks like one of the ladies flanking Ms. Thappar in this picture.”
my gf was listening to the BBC and there was something about miss india on the news. she looked up femina’s site, and told me that she thought that the woman crowned wasn’t as attractive as many of the other one contestants, but she was lighter-skinned, and wondered if that had an impact. i didn’t really know, but i told her i wouldn’t be surprised. but i also offered that perhaps these less “south asian” looking contestants are chosen to gear toward a world-wide judging audience. don’t know.
Note that females names such as those above ending in ‘devi’ etc. are very typical in Indonesia. And the majority of Indonesians are moderate in their beliefs and an even larger proportion carry names with a Sanskrit heritage. Its only a small percentage of those who are orthodox, and who cause all the trouble.
Razib makes a valid point – that it is a tad hypocritical for brown people to argue about white racism, when pop culture from the subcontinent elevates any Indian that looks white. After all, there are plenty of Indians with Chinese facial characteristics, particularly in Bengal and the NE states. Yet such Indians are nowhere to be found in films, tv shows, or magazines.
What makes this so interesting is that so much of the entertainment industry in India is politically left of center, much like their American counterparts. Yet with few exceptions, their product reinforces Indian prejudices. No woman can be darker than a hazelnut, and if you can find a mixed-Indian woman, even better. The webzine Little India had an atypically interesting piece on the demand for non-Indian actresses in Indian cinema, “Foreign Actresses Steam up Bollywood” (http://www.littleindia.com/april2005/ForeignActresses.htm)
There does not seem to be the same demand for foreign male actors romancing Indian women. I guess the female Indian directors (Gurinder Chadha) of the diaspora have a lock on that. But their films are for Western audiences.
Last night, our Bombay relatives wanted me to sit down for a bit to watch Kal Ho Na Ho. I don’t speak Hindi, and the VCD had no subtitles. When I asked why I would be interested, one said, “The whole movie is set and filmed in New York.” where I grew up (ok, Long Island). I then asked why do Indian filmgoers want to watch movies that feature very atypical looking Indians, and increasingly, in movies not set in India?
That is due to the obvious fact that overseas locals are exotic and mostly beautiful. Why would anyone pay money to see a movie set in a dusty place?? Its only natural.
for the same reason they love the song-and-dance scenes in Europe, Australia, and Mauritius, complete with 12 costume changes… fantasy and escape.
Personally, I found it odd how Preity Zinta can jog from QNS, through Central Park, and down to Brooklyn, yet her mom meets her in Brooklyn as if it’s next door… but my cousins in India ate it up with a spoon. That’s what matters, I suppose.
Irma Dimas, El Salvador, hai mai merja!!!!!!
Same reason why American filmmakers film in exotic locations like the Middle East and South Asia….because its different.
That is a ridiculous point. Indians probably prefer whiteness and thats not fair. But doing so doesn’t mean they deserve to be subjected to white racism elsewhere. Nor do they lose the right to bring it up when it exists.
That is a ridiculous point. Indians probably prefer whiteness and thats not fair. But doing so doesn’t mean they deserve to be subjected to white racism elsewhere. Nor do they lose the right to bring it up when it exists.
no one ever said the latter, but, as you said, life is not fair, time is subject to scarcity. each person weights their priorities according to an interal system of principles and probabilities.
i would hold for example that americans of south asian ancestry should be concerned about white racism. i would also hold that south asians who live within and identify with south asian nations should focus on their own problems (which do have a ethno-racial caste, so to speak) as opposed to “american racism.” i will address saurav’s point later, but i never said that white hegemony was off the table, rather, i was making a plea for an acknowledgement that moral equations are based on a host of assumptions, universal justice is an ideal, and where to draw various lines in the sand when demarcating issues is subject to personal intuition and communcal consensus. all these aspects often get lost during one-dimensional exchanges.
“Same reason why American filmmakers film in exotic locations like the Middle East and South Asia….because its different.”
But most American films are not set in the Middle East or South Asia. Most are modern day America or in a galaxy far far away.
“But doing so doesn’t mean they deserve to be subjected to white racism elsewhere. Nor do they lose the right to bring it up when it exists.”
In 2005, an Indian is more likely to experience racism (or some other prejudice) at the hands of another Indian than any white person. Considering that millions of Indian women are not considered “marriage-material” because they are “too-dark”, and that India is the top market for “Fair and Lovely.” But Indians would rather object to bigotry practiced by whites than in their own country.
Likewise most Hindi films are set in India.
Debateable. Depends on where you live, how to define prejudice, etc. Could be an interesting sociological experiment.
Indians are routinely racist against their own people, I agree completely. I don’t know if this statement is correct though.
Look at it generationally…the diasporic first generation (parents) seems to be more intent on making money than about complaining about white racism. You never hear any uncles or aunties complaining about white racism, but you certainly DO hear them make racist comments about other desis as you said.
The people that complain about white racism, that are involved in public interest activities or politics in general are the second generation….the kids. They certainly do make a big stink of white (and non-white) racism (I submit: rightly so). But you don’t hear them make the same kind of comments against Indians like their parents do. I think they object equally to Indian racism.
The statement may apply to desis in desi-stan, but then again the vast majority of them hardly even know whats going on in the world, they are too busy just trying to get by to worry about white global racism.
Razib, I’m a fan of alot of your musings. And I know of your skirmishes with neo-nazis on your site. So as a avid student of genetics, how do you reconcile your tastes which will not only result in mixed offspring but deprive the world of a pure caucasian that your “white” partner would have had if not for your race-mixing. Your personal preference deprive the world something you value. How do you reconcile this, if you do? I submit this respectfully and hope you treat it as such.
Your reworking of the site as a ‘evil withey watch’ is a strawman built for you to tear down. It’s a south-asian general interest site full of divergent voices. Actually, it’s your litmus test of working-class credibility which is highly contradictory. I’m sure there’s less people here of working class (God, I LOATHE that term) stock than the desi-professional variety but I’m sure that can be said for ANY blog on the net. That’s the nature of the beast. A poor white guy riding the bus can tell Danny Glover to shut da fuk about not getting a cab in NYC, but that doesn’t invalidate Mr G’s point.
So as a avid student of genetics, how do you reconcile your tastes which will not only result in mixed offspring but deprive the world of a pure caucasian that your “white” partner would have had if not for your race-mixing. Your personal preference deprive the world something you value
the preference is proximate, not an ultimate value. ie; just because i like ice cream, and eating ice cream means there is less ice cream in the world, doesn’t mean i should eat ice cream. i like ice cream not for the taste, as opposed to it just sitting there as an aesthetic/value judgement. also, standard naturalistic fallacy stuff. just cuz it is my preference doesn’t mean i think it is the “right” or “proper” or “correct” preference.
kind of a black & white answer, but i am short on time right now, might get back to it in a few hours.
ciao.
p.s. for the non-evo nuts and those who don’t read my side, i think ultimate considerations (ie; long term fitness, etc.) are interesting, but i don’t attach much value to them in a moral/political realm, they just are, and you have to work with them depending on what your values are. the proximate issues are something we have to grapple with, but again, how you grapple with them depends on your values. eg; if it was found that most straight males had a reflexively an aversion to gay male sex “hard-wired” into their brain, that doesn’t mean that the reflexive aversion is OK.
should not eat ice cream.
addendum: i am not worried about the fact that there will be fewer blondes in the world because of hardy-weinberg effects (recessive traits show up at frequency q^2, so they are masked by dominant traits). i don’t have much of a brown race consciousness, let alone white consciousness (also, i don’t care if humans turn into cyborns in 100 years or transform themselves into computer simulations).
ok, just thought of a much better analogy, so i will post it before i jet for a bit.
say you are a butt ugly dude. you like hot chicks. you are butt ugly, so can’t get ’em. say you get rich, and hot chicks pay attention to you all of a sudden. do you avoid getting a hot wife because your children (if good looks are heritable) would not be as hot, and some of the hotness in the world would decrease by your reproduction?
i think that makes things clearer.
Most people here are probably from family of privilege. Most people dont want to acknowledge that they are from a priviledged background. The problem in India is not racism (heck, people in India are too busy with bread and butter issues) but the people of middle class background treating poor people as they dont count as human being.
Don’t you get it? You can probably trace racism in India come from the same place (the same way people in the Independence movement in the early 20th century started believing Western nonsense about “Eastern spirituality”).
It’s not hard to understand how it happened, either. Who do you think controlled South Asia’s educational systems for 200 years? Who do you think taught India’s political class in Cambridge and Oxford? Who ruled the earth as if it were a self-evident fact that it should be so? I’m not saying that that’s the only place it comes from, but it’s a major source.
And again, it’s really silly to pretend it’s an either/or; plenty of people object to discrimination (of all kinds) in India AND the US.
You can probably trace racism in India come from the same place
i have done some reading on the color classifications that south asians use, and apparently the specific ones in vogue around northern india date to the muslim period. it was a way for fair-skinned “white” persian and turco-afghan muslims to distinguish themselves from the “black” convert population. it seems from the historical reading i’ve done (somewhat patchy before the muslim period because of the relatively sketchy historiographical tradition among south asian elites) the basic outlines of the “south asian racial world-view” was already there.
but, what did the west bring? what i think they brought was science, understood as the rationalist+empirical+skeptical tradition that crystallized by around 1800 and onward. the science, fused with normal, universal, observations about differences and inequalities among peoples resulted in a systemetization of the vanilla xenophobia that is a human universal into a scientific racism of great power.
but, i think that scientific racism was a short-lived affair, dating between 1870-1910 at its apogee, and falling off the face of the west after 1945, and very fuzzy before 1800. i offer the as evidence the possibility that disraeli, a jew by blood, could become prime minister, or that a even after 1870 a parsi could win a british constinuency as an MP in the 1890s. or, that in the early 19th century, lord liverpool, was PM and was known to have brown blood on his mother’s side (east india company family). the key is not something special about western culture in terms of racial ideology, as the transmutation of conventional bias, prejudice and stereotyping with the addition of science into a world-view.
to clarify this, i would offer the example of the chinese. in the early 18th century the dzunghar region of western mongolia was inhabited by bellicose oryats. this tribe challenged the manchu dynasty for hegemony, and was beaten to a pulp because of the use of gunpower. estimates of mortality rates in dzungharia are as high as 90%. several times in the 18th century the dzhungarian oyrats marched into the russian empire and placed themselves under the “protection” of the czars (or czarina catherine), and marched back, in treks that dwarfed the cherokee trail of tears in both tribulation and distance (the kalmyks of the lower volga are remnants of the oyrats that remained in russia after a large back-migration).
the manchus, leading a chinese empire, obliterated the oyrats as a people. dzungharia was basically sterilized of humans and kazakhs and uighers resettled that region (before the modern han influx). was this a genocide? in terms of outcome it was, but the intent was military and strategic. and yet the chinese (including the sinicized han) were a notoriously “racist” people. embassies to the khmer kingdom commented on the bestial blackness of the natives, their savage nudity, and what not. the mongol and turkic peoples to the north were assumed to be subhuman rat-eaters.
but it was not scientific racism, and the reason i assert this is the confucian mandarinate opposed scientific chinese racists when they arose in the late 19th century. these “progressives” simply transferred the european scientific physical anthropological nomeclature and methodology and ran with it. though the confucian mandarinate was bigoted, chauvanistic and provincial they opposed the systemetization of human differences because it ran against confucian ideals of human perfectibility. the chinese progressives, like western progressives and socialists like h.g. wells, saw the tide of brown color to the south as irritants who would be sterilized in a world divided between yellow and white.
i focus on the chinese because on an international scale it is in east asia that unalloyed scientific racism is dominant. and not just in the east. there are quite clearly high caste south asians who assumed that they are genetically “superior” and born to rule the low caste masses. prior to the modern era this might have been an implicit assumption, but the crystallization of its explicit systemetization is troubling to me.
personally, i do believe in non-trivial differences between populations in a host of variables. but, i also think
a) most attempts by lay persons to apply a “system” garbles the technical nuance that is often on display
b) naturallistic fallacy often applies
in sum, focus on the salience and historical reality of western/white racism is fine. but we are all moderns now, more or less (even the islamists who use videotape and violate the hyper-salafi ban on images). all peoples need to start being cautious about how they mingle their norms and the power of scientific systemetization. i would rather be a “paki” in england than a “barbarian” in china at this point (if you are talking on the global scale, and there are broad implicit assumptions and paradigms in the background about “white racism” in conversations about specific acts and instances).