As a person of color living in Canada, there are two things that I am far too used to hearing from new acquaintances. First, total strangers will ask me where I’m from (no, where I’m really from). Then, they’ll comment on the fairness of my skin.

I’m a pretty curious person, so when I hear an opinion that sounds like it might be related to my skin tone, I’ll ask the person who said it to explain where their comments are coming from. (No, where their comments are really coming from.) And every time, no matter the race or age or gender of the commenter, I hear a variation on the same thing: it’s because you’re pale for a person of color, and I think that makes you pretty.

Here’s the thing. Calling someone beautiful is awesome. If you have the kind of relationship with someone where it’s appropriate for you to compliment their looks, go for it! Remind them that they’re wonderful and beautiful and unique! But before you tell them they’re beautiful, ask yourself: Am I giving this person a compliment that’s going to make them feel enriched, or am I fetishizing a part of their body? Because I can tell you firsthand that being told you’re pretty because you don’t look like “most people” of your race doesn’t feel flattering. It feels like being suddenly submerged in a pool of ice-cold water, every single time.

I'm a light-skinned Chinese woman, and my fair skin is often the first thing people see about me. Whether in a job interview or on a first date, I experience something called “color privilege,” wherein I’m more likely to be afforded the benefits of being coded by others as white or white-passing than darker-skinned members of my race. This phenomenon is called colorism, a term coined by Alice Walker in 1982. Colorism is described as the tendency of society to assign individuals to a racial category based on the color of their skin; in other words, for many POC, the lighter your skin is, the more opportunities become available to you.

Colorism is handled differently by each culture, and I experience it most prominently when I travel to China. Fair skin is so prized in some Asian cultures (including China, Korea, and Japan) that strangers will follow me for blocks, staring, or they’ll get visibly upset when I’m outdoors and not hiding under an umbrella. That’s not an exaggeration – when I visited China this past May, a woman came up to me in the street and shaded my exposed skin with her own hat and arms while scolding my mother for not bringing an umbrella to preserve the whiteness of my skin. (She stuck by us for almost a half hour until we headed to another location, and unfortunately, it was far from the first time that something like that had happened to me overseas.)

In places like Asia, colorism exists more as a status symbol than a racial one. Pale skin was seen in ancient China as a signifier of being able to stay indoors during the daytime rather than being outside working, and a pale complexion became synonymous with nobility and wealth in Chinese culture. The paler you are in most of Asia, the more socieconomic currency is afforded to you based off of your looks.

In Canada, however, colorism's roots come back to that idea of looking white or white-passing. It's experienced differently in each community, and where I live, there's a lot of resentment toward people who look "less white." Instead of existing as a cultural pressure to look like you belong to a certain socioeconomic class, colorism here exists as a pressure to look like you belong to a certain racial group – or as close to it as possible. My darker-skinned Chinese friends and family experience more microaggressions and racial profiling than I ever have, and it's made schooling and looking for work harder for them. I have mixed-race cousins who have taken their Caucasian parent's last name in order to pass as white in interviews, and POC friends with dark summer tans who have been stopped and checked by law enforcement officers in their own communities because they "looked out of place."