Priyanka Chopra Jonas recently reflected on times during her adolescence in which she was bullied for her appearance, particularly for the color of her skin.
She recalls her origins as if they were a lifetime ago. Even before she was an inter-continental star, cultural division was a defining factor of Chopra’s life.At 13, she left her family in India to study in the United States, living with her aunt and uncle in Newton, Mass.But being a gawky teenager and the only Indian girl at school wasn’t without its challenges, namely, xenophobic encounters that proved too suffocating and dispiriting to endure. “I was bullied by a freshman named Jeanine. She was black, and supremely racist. Jeanine used to say, ‘Brownie, go back to your country, you smell of curry,’ or ‘Do you smell curry coming?’ You know when you’re a kid, and you’re made to feel bad about where your roots are, or what you look like? You don’t understand it, you just feel bad about who you are.”
The bullying tested her resolve and broke it. “I told my mom, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’” She returned to India defeated, her mind set on becoming an engineer despite her burgeoning movie-star looks. Then, when she applied for a scholarship, her mother sent professionally shot photos to the Miss India pageant without telling her. To her surprise, she won. “The thing is,” she tells me while recalling the start of her career, “I don’t like losing, in anything I do, whatever it might be.
Talks about experiencing racism in India:
"A lot of girls with a darker skin hear things like, 'Oh, poor thing, she’s dark,'" she explained to the outlet. "In India, they advertise skin-lightening creams: 'Your skin’s gonna get lighter in a week.' I used it [when I was very young]."
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