Slavery and colonization have wreaked havoc on the dominated subject. The most pernicious of all, seems to me, to be the idea that the former slave or colonized person has of himself in his relations with the slaveholder or the colonist of yesterday.
The seduction of the dominant power, of its power induces in the fragile subject, the aspiration to resemble the Master, including physically…
This is how the Caucasian or Caucasoid model, which generally encompasses the physical phenotypes of populations from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, southern Central Asia, and the north of South Asia is acclaimed by individuals of the Negroid type, of elementary philosophical training and in identity crisis.
If this phenomenon turns out to be a public health problem, an economic problem, it is more so in the philosophical, intellectual, cultural and spiritual construction of the Peoples.
AN ECONOMIC AND PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE
Speaking of health, many reduce their understanding of this issue to an individual dimension, in the sense that one would be free to do with one’s body what one wants, to choose the skin color one we want. They should go further by saying that we are free to sell and consume the drug that we want…
More seriously, public health policy is the domain of the State, which defines and implements a policy that protects the citizen. As such, it monitors the health risks threatening populations, promotes health and reduces risks. As part of this mission, medicines and functional foods are subject to particular vigilance. Their marketing is subject to special authorization or strict control. The idea here being to ensure the good health of citizens and to protect the consumer who is sometimes lost in the middle of the jungle of health claims.
As part of this mission, the public authorities, through an expert approach, assess the risk benefit of any product, food, whose marketing authorization is submitted to it. In this approach, the precautionary principle, which aims to put in place measures to prevent risks, when science and technical knowledge are not able to provide certainties, mainly in the field of the environment and health, we only authorize the circulation of products for which we have the scientific guarantee, in the state of the evolution of science, of their quality. It therefore implies the a priori prohibition of doubtful products.
A dangerous product is not just for the consumer. This is not just a matter of individual liberty, but of public health and even health economics. The cost for families, for the State, and therefore for society as a whole of the treatment of pathologies that a good public health policy would have made it possible to avoid is in this sense very eloquent.
SKIN DEPIGMENTATION: A MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEM AND AN IDENTITY CRISIS
The problem of skin depigmentation is not just a physical health problem, it is more of a mental health problem, an identity crisis.
To sell in a society the idea that one would be beautiful or eligible for something, according to the color of his skin, is a real tragedy. Is built by this idea, a society of sub-persons, waiting to realize themselves in a lighter skin, a racialized society, in which the identity that we give ourselves determines our existence. A stripped, fake society…
To lighten the skin is therefore to promote the “sacredness” of the Caucasian.
THE EXAMPLE OF SOUTH AFRICA
Of all my travels that have taken me to almost all the continents of this world, my travels to South Africa were a great lesson:
I met there the most beautiful creatures on this earth. However, depigmentation is prohibited there, the marketing of lightening products is assimilated and punished in the same way as drug trafficking. Since 2019, a young Cameroonian has been serving a 10-year prison sentence there, for having fraudulently introduced shit made in Cameroon.
In this country of African cultural pride, the Cameroonian, Congolese, Nigerian immigrant can be recognized by her false hair, her false skin color, her superficiality, ultimately her insignificance.
Me Amedee Dimitri Touko Tom
Expert in Health Law