The Racist Implications of Filtering Introduction Light skin. Small nose. Freckles. Full lips. Large, alluring eyes. Scroll through Instagram, Snapchat, or any other social media or photo editing app and you will find that there are literally thousands of ways to manipulate not just your looks, but seemingly, your biology itself. Unfortunately, the images given to us in the “beauty filter” on Tik Tok or the “Soft Filter” on Snapchat reflect standards of beauty that we see propagated all around us.
From skin lightening creams used by women worldwide to people with looser curls being told that they have “good hair,” it doesn’t take a race scholar to interpret the obvious: in our society, your proximity to whiteness determines your beauty. And while certainly we have seen a rise in desiring traits of ethnic women— those BBL memes are far more sinister t han we think — these traits are still deemed more attractive by our white supremacist society when a white person has them.
33 Photo Credit: Grace Brogan
