Nivea's controversial skin-lightening ad puts spotlight on the history of white supremacy

The skincare company Nivea makes dozens of products for women and men around the world.

But what you probably didn't know until earlier this week is that Nivea also sells skin-lightening cream to consumers in Africa.

While it's not the only company to market such products — L'Oréal and Pond's have their own whitening lines — a Nivea ad for a skin-lightening lotion called "Natural Fairness" went viral this week after black London-based entrepreneur William Adoasi shared it on Twitter.

The ad aired in Ghana as a product that "visibly lightens" skin color. It's the latest bit of beauty marketing called out for racist themes or messages. A few weeks ago, Dove published a GIF on Facebook that featured a black woman removing her top over her head to reveal a white woman. The company dropped the ad and apologized. Earlier this year, Nivea was criticized for a Facebook ad geo-targeted to Middle East users with the slogan "white is purity."

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The new Nivea ad unleashed both outrage and debate. Some found the ad's message racist; others argued that Nivea is just serving its customers' needs.

But the story of skin-lightening products in Africa goes back to the Victorian era, which coincides with the height of colonialism in Africa, says Yaba Blay, the Dan Blue Endowed Chair in Political Science at North Carolina Central University.

"Colonialism was an ideological war," says Blay, who is from Ghana and has studied the practice of skin bleaching extensively. "How do you come to control people's minds? You control how they see themselves, particularly in relationship to you. White, white, white became the metaphor for all things good."

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Indeed, European women began exaggerating and emphasizing their whiteness with makeup and soap as a way of convincing white men that they could produce "purely" white children.

When European traders began exporting soap and other whitening products to colonies, they considered it part of their "civilizing mission." And when Africans rejected those goods as useless, the perceived disrespect sometimes cost them their lives.

"The colonial moment when skin bleaching products become widespread and popular was about, 'We’re civilized and you’re barbaric,'" says Blay. "That market was created."

A spokesperson for Beiersdorf AG, the company that owns Nivea, told Mashable that the product and advertising campaign are part of a business strategy designed to address consumers' "diverse skin care needs":

"We recognize the response and concerns raised around the campaign in Ghana for our NIVEA Natural Fairness Body Lotion and take the feedback seriously. This marketing campaign was never intended to offend any consumers.

As a global company, Beiersdorf offers a wide range of products that are aimed to address the diverse skin care needs of our consumers around the world. We acknowledge every consumer’s right to choose products according to their personal preferences, and we are guided by that to provide them with high-quality skin care product choices."

While debate about the ad has involved blaming women for using lightening products, Blay says she rejects the idea of targeting individual consumers.

"Because of white supremacy and the ways women have internalized many messages, even if you take the products off the market, they’re not going to stop bleaching," she says.

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What angers Blay more is that some of the active agents in lightening products are considered harmful and yet are still sold in places like West Africa. The skin bleaching ingredient hydroquinone, for example, is banned in the European Union because it may act as a cancer-causing agent, but companies can still manufacture products with it, export them to foreign markets, and sell them in communities of color.

Blay also doesn't believe that "haphazardly" telling people to practice self-love and stop using whitening products is an effective strategy.

"We're living in a context where the whole society projects images that don't look like me and calls that beautiful," she says. "We are telling people to love themselves, but how?"