After years of trying to erase her features and heritage, Priyanka Chopra is embracing her Indian background.
“A lot of girls who have a darker skin hear things like, ‘Oh, poor thing, she’s dark. Poor thing, it’ll be hard for her,’” the “Baywatch” star recalled in Glamour’s June issue.
“In India they advertise skin-lightening creams: ‘Your skin’s gonna get lighter in a week.’ I used it [when I was very young],” she said. “Then when I was an actor, around my early twenties, I did a commercial for a skin-lightening cream. I was playing that girl with insecurities. And when I saw it, I was like, ‘Oh s—t. What did I do?’ And I started talking about being proud of the way I looked. I actually really like my skin tone.”
Chopra, 34, admitted that she used to downplay her culture in order to assimilate with her peers, especially in high school, where she encountered one particularly nasty racist bully.
“I don’t think a lot of people understand what Indians are. And that’s our fault, a little,” she said. “We tend to forget our roots a bit. As kids [we think], ‘If I’m too Indian, I’ll be put in a box, and people will think of me as different. They’ll think I’m weird, because I eat Indian food or my name is difficult to pronounce,'” she explained. “That girl in school used to call me ‘curry.’ You’re scared of those things. We’re afraid of letting people see the glory of who we are.”