Last week, me and one of my best childhood friends went to a concert together in the city. This friend of mine is one of the most incredible woman I know, hands down. She is brilliant, successful, fun, beautiful inside and out, and, lastly, she is Chinese. I never thought about that part of her that much- it just was what it was. While we were driving out from the concert we talked over the radio and continued to catch up. Then she mentioned something that has now been sitting with me for over a week… she casually brought up how a number of Asian women will get a surgery so that the have a “double lid”. I’d heard of it but she explained how it adds a line to the crease above the eye so that the person’s eyes look more Euro-white, for lack of better words. She pulled down the mirror in the passenger seat and looked at her eyes for a minute.

White-washing is a term used popularly on the internet to describe what the media does to many famous women who are black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern- essentially whatever isn't Western European. This can be seen in Cosmo or Vogue any day of the week. These are the dramatic, heavy handed examples of it. You could google any Elle magazine cover and you would be able to notice the skin lightening and photoshop immediately. There are more subtle jobs like Kerry Washington on the cover of InStyle- skin lightened, eyebrows fair, and hair washed out. Then there is sloppy, offensive covers like Mindy Kaling’s Elle cover which lacks all color and is done in grayscale. These are more blatant cases- micro-aggressions are also slipped into media portrayals of these women as well. Queen B was white-washed in a shampoo commercial years back. Her skin lightened and hair, too. Although the subtle details are altered, too. From a side view Beyoncé’s (obviously flawless) face shape is completely changed. Her nose is photoshopped to seem more angular, more European, more… white.

Young girls already have so many inner issues they have to deal with- having been a teenage girl I know how it is to feel flawed for no reason. The last thing you need to do is make their entire race or ethnicity feel like a flaw. Having women from unique and cultured backgrounds in the mainstream media is wildly important but it is so backwards if all we’re going to do is try to make them less and less like themselves.

White-washing is a huge problem right now in the mainstream media. Letting young girls and young women believe that they need to be less of themselves is a wildly toxic for their esteem. Women from every single corner of this world is beautiful in totally different ways. I am not beautiful the way my black friends are, or even my Irish friends, or my Hispanic friends, or any of my friends. But just because we are not beautiful like each other doesn’t mean we aren't beautiful. Letting the final five contestants of Miss Teen USA 2016 be white, blonde, blue eyed, Euro-centric girls is crippling to every young girl who is not that. How does that make us look? How does that reflect how far we’ve come?

Let girls be who they are… literally. Stop forcing the European ideals on girls who are just not European. Stop making the role models in the media appear as white as possible- that is only setting us back years. Stop telling us that their is a “standard” for beautiful and that standard requires you to be of a certain ethnic background. Just stop. White-washing is nothing but a thin vail of racism in the media, modeling industry, beauty contests, and social media. If you think this is normal… you’re definitely part of the problem.