Western Influence Quotes

“Globalization by the way of McDonald’s and KFC has captured the hearts, the minds, and from what I can see through the window, the growing bellies of the folks here.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“The idea that a professional tracker like Idriss could suddenly start suffering from a sort of poetic remorse, soulfulness, regret at the memory of the animals he had tracked down— such an idea could only come to birth in decadent brains and exquisite sensitivities freshly arrived from Europe — which were the beginning of all our troubles in Africa and elsewhere, be it said in passing.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven