In Cambodia, lighter skin tones are traditionally associated with fortune, virtue, superiority, and good luck. These associations have a spiritual component due to how Buddhist beliefs around karma are interpreted locally. Skin tone – along with other traits such as class, health, and gender – are believed to have been determined by the individual’s accumulation of karma in their previous lives. People with lighter skin tones are believed to have more merit due to having accumulated positive karma.

Last week we were in Thailand for regional meetings. While we were there we were told that all good sons spend some time as Buddhist monks in order to earn karma for their mothers. Good Thai sons do this to help their mothers accumulate enough merit to be reincarnated as men. I’ll write more on this another time but traditional Khmer gender roles – in which women held economic, social, religious, and political influence – have been significantly eroded by outside influence in recent centuries. In 1837, the Code of Conduct for Women outlined in great detail how women must be passive and obedient to male authority, yet are also responsible for male behavior and excess. This treatise was actually based on gender roles that were popular in the Siamese court, not traditional Khmer gender roles. The French destroyed traditional community power structures that included women – dismissing them as backwards – and replaced them with male dominated systems based on those in France. The French also enshrined the Code of Conduct on Women as the definition of traditional Khmer gender roles, despite it being written less than 30 years prior to the colonial period. In recent decades, globalism and consumerism have further eroded away at traditional female power and authority.

Regional beliefs on skin tone are rooted in ancient classism. The lower class were engaged in manual labor outdoors under the sun and thus had darker skin tones. The upper class spent more time indoors and subsequently had lighter skin tones. Today there is a spectrum of racism based on skin tone, not just between the Khmer and other ethnic groups, but also within the Khmer ethnic majority themselves. Each individual is judging their own skin tone, as well as those of the people around them, in order to determine how they fit into the social hierarchy.

Cambodian men face these prejudices but, for a variety of reasons, it doesn’t impact them as directly as it does women. There is a particularly strong intersection between gender and skin tone; Cambodian girls and women are under significant pressure to have lighter skin tones as this is considered more beautiful. In a collectivist society, the social capital that a woman earns by being ‘more beautiful’ does not belong solely to her as an individual but instead boosts the status of her parents, her husband, her family members, and her ancestors. The opposite is also true, if a Cambodian girl or women is considered ‘ugly’ then it reflects badly on her network. In response to this societal pressure it is common for Cambodian women, especially in urban areas and among the middle-to-upper class, to resort to a variety of dangerous skin whitening products to bleach their skin.

During the colonial period, the French doubled down on these preexisting cultural biases around skin tone in order to justify their racism, sexism, and exploitation of the Khmer people. The French put themselves at the top of the social hierarchy but also elevated Vietnamese officials with lighter skin tones to roles in the colonial administration. Khmer were largely excluded from the French colonial administration of their own homeland. French colonial racism further deepened the local inferiority complex around skin tone and added broader racist undertones.

Traditionally, foreigners* from non-neighboring lands are held in great esteem in Cambodian society. Two thousand years ago the Khmer emerged as a distinct ethnicity when a local Queen married a foreigner, an Indian merchant. For expatriates, this respect for foreigners has cancelled out some of the local prejudice around skin tones.

*It’s different for neighboring ethnicities like the Vietnamese, Cham, Thai, and Lao.

During my first term here, I distinctly remember a partner director complaining that his young daughter had a darker skin tone and then joked that as an ‘afrik’ she wouldn’t get a husband when she grew up. I could offer a few dozen more examples of this. However, at that time, actual Africans were still broadly received and treated with respect as foreigners.

This was in marked contrast to how Africans were and are treated in Thailand and Việt Nam. In the early 2000s, one of my friends (who was then Sudanese, but who is now South Sudanese) traveled to Việt Nam as part of our University’s cross cultural course and told me afterwards that she had never experienced such vicious racism anywhere else in the world. This shocked me as the vast majority of Vietnamese had been warm and welcoming, treating me as a honored guest, despite the troubled history between our two countries. This made me aware of how the local racism was propelling me upward, simply based on my skin tone, while pulling almost everyone else down. Pushed to the bottom of the local social hierarchy, solely based on her skin tone, was my friend from Sudan.

Today, Cambodia’s traditional respect for foreigners is beginning to erode as the internet and globalization introduce new strands of racism. I touched on this in my post on War, Peace, and YAMEN but there have been paid social media ad campaigns are intentionally targeting Cambodians with the message that Africans are drug dealers.

Through our YAMEN/SALT program we’ve seen this growing prejudice, especially in urban areas, towards foreigners with darker skin tones. Especially Africans. The Phnom Penh Post had a great article on this back in 2014; Beneath the Skin: Reality of Being Black in Cambodia.

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