About three months ago at a well-known “massage parlour” operating somewhere in St Andrew, Coffee (not her real parlour name) was just about the only black-skinned girl working there.

She was given the name because all the other good ones used to describe an ebony goddess were already taken. The other 26 girls, all young, and like Coffee, devastatingly beautiful to the eye, catered to the steady stream of uptown businessmen, politicians and those with money to spend on life’s carnal pleasures who visited the parlour.

Months before that, the majority of the other brown-skinned girls used to be black, but due to the vogue of the times or what may be a problem afflicting significant sections of the international black community and very definitely right here at home, the girls in due course bleached away their black skins and now they are all “brownings”.

“Don’t believe that it affects only Jamaica,” said a regular traveller between Jamaica, Atlanta and New York. “You will see them on the streets, even some Africans and Haitians – they are big in it too,” she said.

Pressure eventually reached to Coffee, not only by way of her colleague “massage therapists” but simply because the men who came in, after viewing the bevy of young women, would not request her “services”. In the space of three months, with the application of creams and lotions, Coffee added much milk to her cup and even though her name hasn’t changed, the beautiful ebony-skinned woman disappeared and eventually morphed into another browning.

There are many times that I feel quite foolish lecturing young women on certain “ends” and “corners” about not just the dangers of applying chemicals to their skin but on the stupidity of changing from a natural black beauty to a chemically induced browning.

“Look at how beautiful black skin is. Why would you want to change it to something else?” is usually met with a shrug, or, “You can seh anyting, Mark, tings a gwaan fi you.”

“Nutten nah gwaan fi yuh when you stay like how you stay. As yuh start bleach, di man dem jus run up inna yuh,” said a 25-year-old browning who used to be black-skinned when I met her four years ago. According to the unemployed young woman, she started it because all of her friends were doing it, but along the way she began to see tangible results.

“When mi go pon di road wid mi brown skin, mi too hot fi handle. Man a call to mi and if mi inna dance, a pure free drink jus a reach mi,” she said.

I have yet to meet a reasonably well-educated or intelligent person who is into the craze. One 50-year-old woman I know, who made it out of a rough inner-city community by way of having two children for a Chinese shopkeeper in that very community, has been bleaching (her entire body) for about eight years now. Her 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship is also bleaching, but it could hardly be said that the child had much choice in the matter. What madness is this?

It cannot be sensible to conclude that because someone is uneducated or unintelligent, that person is automatically irrational. The people who bleach all seem to feel good about themselves and their new-found self-esteem. Certainly, they look at their surroundings and their immediate neighbours in the cramped inner-city communities are all black-skinned and struggling in an extremely harsh economic environment. Not far from where they live are the upscale communities and it is there that they look to for signposts to their future.

The naturally brown-skinned men and women who live in these communities seem to be doing quite fine at the top of the economic scale, but aren’t there many economically successful black-skinned people living in those communities, too, more in numbers than those who are brown?

A part of the answer, I believe, could be found in young people’s strong attachment to the prevailing culture in dancehall and their knowledge of the American hip hop and R&B pop culture. There are many young people in Jamaica who sincerely believe that some American pop megastars have bleached their skin, even though they have no hard evidence of it.

At home we have certainly seen Vybz Kartel, the biggest name in dancehall, looking lighter in the face than in previous months. Let us not fool ourselves by failing to recognise that dancehall music is the primary communicator of information in Jamaica. What is Kartel trying to communicate to the many young people who idolise him?

A woman who sells the product tells me, “Many of the girls who come into my store are unemployed and they buy products sold for up to $2,000. I honestly don’t know where they find the money.”

Another woman told me that for her to maintain her full-body bleached skin while using the regular chemicals, she uses powder detergent on her skin at least twice per week! The advance in communications has told us in no uncertain fashion that the globe called Earth is controlled by those with paler skins. Added to that is not enough examples of countries and people of black skin which have made it to the top of the economic pyramid. All things being equal, a naturally brown-skinned girl in a Jamaican inner-city community has a much better chance of making it out of the ghetto than her black-skinned counterparts. Why is that so?

A part of that, I believe, is to be found in our menfolk, many of whom have not thrown off the ghosts of what ailed this country many years ago. A black-skinned man may marry a white-skinned woman and they may live happily ever after. Good for them, like any other couple. That is not what I am referring to.

I am speaking about more than the possibility that many of our Jamaican men still harbour a quiet but deep, almost psychotic need to possess a pale-skinned woman. It is the hangover of a ghost that stalked the land way back before the 1940s when almost everything associated with goodness and purity, especially in religion, was white or shrouded in a white skin.

We are a highly religious people and the picture of the man many Jamaicans have hanging on their walls as representing the Son of God is white. That would also make God white – Who it is said made man in His own image. So, why not bleach to finally reclaim one’s true self and patrimony? Poor Marcus, indeed!

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