Domande e risposte esame di lingua inglese

Skin-whitening products

In many parts of the world today, there is a profitable market for products which lighten or whiten people’s skin. Why do people use these products? The promotion of the use of skin-whitening products is widespread in many countries in Asia and Africa. In these societies, ‘white’ and lighter skin is considered more beautiful and therefore more desirable. Especially for women, white skin is associated with beauty and based on the color of the skin it tells if a woman is beautiful or not.

Nevertheless, these products are full of chemicals and are very dangerous because they manipulate the melanin in the skin. They are not natural at all.

This phenomenon has historical origins, back to Colonial times. Indeed, darker skin was and is associated with labour and field work in the sun, and so with oppression, poverty, and ugliness. On the other hand, white skin is associated with wealth and people who don't work hard. All of this has set the standard for attractiveness in poorer countries.

During the English course, to better understand this phenomenon, we have seen and analyzed some Indian ads that promoted back in the 2000s a cream product for skin lightening called “Fair and Lovely”. Often these kinds of products had a name related to something pure, genuine, and beautiful. The majority of these spots had as the main character a girl that, after using the product, becomes successful in life, finding a job or a man to marry with.

Even though the product that I mentioned has been banned, the phenomenon is still spread in many countries, especially today in South Korea.

The stolen generation

What is the meaning of the term ‘stolen generation’? The term “stolen generation” refers to all the children, about 20/25 thousand, of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian government agencies and church missions in the period between the late 1800s and 1970s.

During that period, a law gave the states and territories of Australia the right to remove Aboriginal children without the permission of their parents. They were taken to missions (institutions) run by the Catholic and Lutheran churches where the kids were educated exclusively on the Christian culture. In addition, they had no contact with their own indigenous languages and, growing up, they did not get to know about their own indigenous cultures, losing totally their indigenous identity. As adults, it was very difficult for them to find their families again because basic information was not recorded.

Children were removed because the Aboriginal race was seen as an embarrassment to white Australia. Therefore the idea was to save the half-castes and "make them white" with the aim to ‘keep A