"You're pretty for a Mauritian"

On backhanded compliments and colourist beauty standards

I nearly choked on my drink. Last week I was at a birthday gathering, chatting with and catching up with friends as one does. It came to my attention that one of the guests was Mauritian, on her mother’s side. It is uncommon for me to bump into Mauritians in Paris to this day, so I was ecstatic to have a compatriot by my side. We exchanged pleasantries, talking about Mauritius, her trips there, the town where her mother was born - the usual indicators that we Mauritians use to situate one another on the spectrum of Mauritianness. Everything was going fine, up until the moment where she halted our discussion by blurting out that line: “I just wanted to say, you are pretty for a Mauritian.”

I was stunned. I laughed nervously. “Um, that isn’t a compliment, don’t you think?” I managed to say, unsure whether she was joking or not.

She was not.

“No, what I mean to say is that Mauritian women aren’t very… pretty. Do you understand what I mean?”

I assured her that I did not understand what she meant. What does a Mauritian woman look like? Who does she have in mind when she uses the term “Mauritian women”? I went through the roster of the Mauritian women I knew and grew up with - Indo-Mauritians, Afro-Mauritians, Sino-Mauritians - a slideshow of different hues and shapes and sizes.

“Don’t get me wrong, I think Indian women are beautiful,” she cooed. “For example, I think that Aishwarya Rai is extremely gorgeous. But, you see what I mean. After visiting Mauritius, my boyfriend looked me up and down and told me that I was really pretty, in comparison to the Mauritians he had seen.”

I felt lost in translation. In what world is “You’re pretty for a *fill the blanks*” is a compliment? In this specific case, what does it even mean to look Mauritian? And how is Aishwarya Rai representative of “Indian” beauty? I was trying to process all of these questions in my mind while she kept sinking lower into the pits of her argument. She finally changed seats, ending the conversation in mock frustration at my unwillingness to “accept a compliment.” I tried to maintain my composure, but I was livid. I would have never expected a fellow Mauritian, let alone a Mauritian woman, to engage in such self-hatred. But I should have known better.

This woman was coming from a place of racial privilege - she was a white-passing, racially ambiguous woman with light-coloured eyes. She was born and grew up in Europe, in France presumably, where she got to benefit from the thrill of being “exotic” while still bearing proximity to whiteness. Instead of questioning her position and the relative privileges she benefitted from, she chose to engage in internalised, racialised misogyny.

Hearing her casually disparage Mauritian women by dumping all of us into the same basket made my blood boil because it most definitely came from a colourist and racist position. I use those words deliberately because as a dark-skin Mauritian I have experienced this first-hand. Even if I grew up in Mauritius, surrounded by a lot of people who looked like me, white beauty standards were glorified and religiously upheld. I firmly believed that I was ugly because my skin was too dark. How could I believe the contrary? All the advertisement billboards in my country are and were plastered with light-skin bodies and faces (think of the Roxy, Body & Soul or Billabong posters in Mauritius). I would hear uncles and aunties at weddings praising the fair skin of cousins while deploring the excess melanin of others: “Ayo, li bien zoli, li bien kler.” Many of my childhood friends would refuse to go to the beach, scared of catching a deadly tan. This internalised hatred of dark skins is drilled into us from a very young age, and it takes time and a lot of energy to work our way out of it.

Two years ago, I started looking at the covers of Essentielle, a popular women’s magazine in Mauritius. I wanted to look at the different skin tones of the “cover girls” that were showcased across the years, and determine whether lighter skin tones were predominant in the sample. Each square represents the skin tone detected by Canva’s colour pinpoint, which I hovered over the face section of each model to get the hue. I admit that It is not a perfect system, but it gives us an idea of the skin colour ranges that are usually favoured to represent beauty standards in Mauritius. I feel like the colour spectrum is skewed towards lighter/medium skin shades. I’m open to other conclusions, so please chime in with your interpretations regarding the slideshows below.

I think what irked me the most was that this person, who had never lived in Mauritius, felt empowered to claim that most Mauritian women were not pretty, and expected me to bask in the knowledge that I was not like them.

PSA: “you’re not like other girls” or “you're pretty for a *insert race/social category/whatever distinction* girl“ is NOT a compliment. I had until this point mostly read and heard testimonies from Black women on how this backhanded compliment was often thrown in their faces and had understood the misogynoir behind those comments. It was harder to reckon with what it meant when it was a fellow compatriot who was using it against me.

If you feel the need to diminish an entire group of people for a compliment, maybe you should just keep that thought to yourself, and ask yourself why your sense of self-worth is inherently tied to belittling others.

And if you want to compliment somebody, but don’t know how to, I strongly recommend using this Leslie Knope compliment generator.

Angrily yours,

S.