Tribalism is Killing Us: Colourism Makes Us Accomplices to Our Own Murders

Tina Gharavi examines the origins of her own addiction to whiteness

I could not have been much older than five as I was still living in Iran and this moment that I will never forget took place in my grandmother’s house in the centre of Tehran. The Islamic Revolution had not yet happened. I – a light brown Iranian girl – was in the shower, lathering myself up and scrubbing my skin, over and over until it was raw. My grandmother stood at the door (probably with a cigarette in the film version of this) and in this wide, busy tiled bathroom with an avocado green porcelain suite and windows that opened onto a central courtyard, I told her that I wanted to be as white as Snow White.  She batted her heavily mascaraed eyes and pursed her lips. She understood.

There were – sadly – no images of little girls like me. Not even in  my school classroom where the walls were adorned with images of the Shah of Iran’s family: Farah Diba and Reza Pahlavi and their children. Their pale, pale skin reminded me that I was not one of them. This little girl had ingested all the hate and white supremacy that Disney had to offer. There was no Encanto, no Moana, no Raya and the Last Dragon. Not even The Cosby Show. But even in my own Persian family, there was a secret desire and being fairer was desirable and had value.

Whiteness had done a number on me. Aged just 5 ½.

I wonder whether collectively, as a species, the human one, we can begin to understand the damage that white supremacy has on us. On our collective imaginations. But more importantly on our psyche.

This weekend, a friend sat at my dining table. He confessed to me that walking through the basement of a University building he had looked inside a room and saw a black man. Immediately he assumed this man to be a caretaker or janitor. It turned out that he was indeed a brilliant maritime engineer– a savant who had designed ships and won awards around the world. However, my friend was ashamed, saddened, because, like the man in the basement room, he too was black. In a split second he saw how others might see him. I told him not to be too hard on himself: we all have things against basements – anyone we see in them must be maintenance. But I knew. He knew. We all know. Even us, who are not white, we partake in white supremacy too. 

The point of this story is not to let “white people”  or those with privilege, off the hook. No, it is to say that some of the fiercest guardians of white supremacy are us. 

How does it work? How have we learnt to ascribe value to something as trivial and meaningless as skin colour? After all, we only ascribe 0.01% of our genes code for race.

The great American writer James Baldwin said “What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.” It’s insidious, subtle and ultimately it needs the participation of the victims too.

Skin colour does not designate any values at all, except for what we as a society decide to ascribe to it. Recently, coming up against the same remarkable colourism in the making of Queen Cleopatra for Netflix, I asked myself where this comes from, and how does it work so effectively that we can end up hating ourselves?

The fact that we do not see, regularly enough, images of darker skinned folk associated with goodness, excellence and success might be part of it. The iconography around us, also lends to what our values and aspirations are. Representation matters. Luckily for me, not too long after the events in my grandmother’s bathroom, I came across Muhammad Ali, the three-time heavyweight champion of the world. This changed my perception of what greatness could be: unapologetic, excellent, and melanated. Ali said he was beautiful and by extension, I was beautiful too. But could it be that simple?

Somehow we have subscribed to a system which places whiteness at the top of the tree. Is there anything intrinsically better about being white? Objectively no. But our deeply held biases – some conscious and some unconscious – mean we are in a death spiral of hate and self-hatred. 

Lyndon B. Johnson, the US President during much of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s,  admitted, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

And that, my friends, shows you that the hierarchy of skin colour is about pitting brother against brother, sister against sister.  It's what is at the heart of the outrage and resistance I've experienced when daring to show a representation of an important historical figure as one particular skin colour vs another. Whiteness isn’t about you being better than another – it is about allowing you to do the job of suppressing those who are deemed fit for exploiting. Capitalism needs us to do the hating, the dividing. Those who benefit? The ones who exploit. Without us participating in this, regardless of our skin colour, the hierarchy falls apart.

Do I know what the cure is to our addiction to whiteness? No. But will I ever stop asking the question: what exactly bothers you so much about our darker skinned brothers and sisters? The answer is also No. 

I have no illusions that things will change overnight but I am hopeful that younger generations will do this better than us, a future where generation upon generation liberates themselves from the shackles of self-hatred and judgements that imprison our better angels. I hope young women (and men and nonbinary folk) are inspired by Lizzo, Janelle Monaé – and by this new depiction of Cleopatra.

Baldwin also said: “Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.” So those who hate need to sit still with their anger and ask themselves what it is that they hate about themselves.

To the little girl who scrubbed her skin raw, I want to tell her this:“You are perfectly beautiful in your own skin..” 

And she, in turn, looks back at me, across 45 years of time and says: “Keep fighting for me.”

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Tina Gharavi is a BAFTA and Sundance-nominated filmmaker. Her Netflix debut, a hybrid drama-doc series, Queen Cleopatra, for Nutopia and Westbrook, exec produced by Jada Pickett-Smith, was released in May 2023.