in all likelihood, were Australian. That just because someone had dark skin didn’t mean they were foreign; that the original inhabitants of this continent were all black or brown.
‘Remember how we watched Cathy Freeman light the flame at the opening of the Olympic Games?’ I asked him. ‘She’s brown and she’s Australian.’ I explained that our family looked the way we did because our ancestors came from Ireland. ‘Australians come in all colours,’ I said, appalled that somehow this wasn’t obvious to him. After all, we Melburnians pride ourselves on living in one of the most multicultural cities in the world. There were black kids and Asian kids at his childcare centre. How was it that being white had, for him, even at his tender age, become intrinsic to being Australian?
I counted it as a small victory when one day, not long after this conversation, as we were walking around our neighbourhood, we came across a man delivering advertising brochures.
‘Look, Mum,’ my son said loudly, pointing at him as we passed, ‘He’s brown and he’s Australian.’
WHEN WE REFER to ourselves and others as being ‘black’ or ‘white’, we are rarely talking about just the colour of our skin. Blackness and whiteness each have their own set of inherent meanings to do with history, culture, and politics that go beyond the amount of melanin in a particular individual’s skin.
Despite the fact that the majority of the world’s population come in varying degrees of brown, it is the binary alternatives of black and white, and their attached symbolism, that is forced upon us. Traditionally, black has been associated with sin and defilement, white with goodness and purity.
As a child brought up within the Roman Catholic faith, I knew that the innermost part of my being, my soul, was, of course, white. Visible only to God, it hovered inside the borders of my body, a perfect simulacrum, albeit a pale, insubstantial one. Sins, I was told, would appear like black stains on that pristine whiteness if I strayed from the path defined as right and good by the Church. Limbo was still a tenet of the Catholic faith then, and for my peers and me it was filled with little black babies—the progeny of the pagan hordes who lived in the dark continent of Africa. Having died before they could be baptised, these babies could never be admitted to heaven but were to linger forever in the in-between place of Limbo.
In my heart of hearts, I envied them. We were told by the nuns who gave us religious instruction that Limbo was exactly like heaven, except that those in Limbo were denied seeing the face of God. That would have been a blessed relief as far as I was concerned. The idea of God’s huge, bearded head looming perpetually out of the clouds was alarming to my five-year-old self to say the least.
Even recalling that image now, planted so vividly in my imagination as I sat in the cold room beneath the nave receiving religious instruction, makes me nervous about the idea of heaven. Oh, to be a little black baby, babbling happily in the benign environment of Limbo, blissfully ignorant of the existence of God.
AS I BOARD a bus in Strasbourg, France, my eyes are drawn to an extraordinary looking woman who has already taken her seat. Her skin is exceptionally pale, and her thick, wiry hair, arrayed in an intricate pattern of plaited rows, is a yellowy-cream. When she removes her sunglasses, for a moment, I see that long, milky eyelashes frame her whey-coloured eyes in a remarkable frill. Despite the translucence of her skin and corn-silk coloured hair, her features are unmistakeably African.
The disjunction of her complexion and her features draws my gaze. I fight the urge to stare, but my eyes are drawn again and again to that impossibly white skin and improbably coloured hair. The woman has an otherworldly beauty that sets her apart whether I look at her or not. The effect of her appearance is so dramatic that I immediately associate it with the images once so popular with Benetton, the clothing manufacturer, and its iridescent advertising campaigns featuring gorgeous models with every possible variation of skin and hair colour. I realise of course that, far from being a prop for a hip, multiracial, we-are-the-world clothing manufacturer, my fellow passenger has albinism.
In The Book of Enoch, a work regarded as non-canonical by the vast majority of Christian churches and not included either in the Jewish scriptures or the Christian Old Testament, the story is told of the birth of Noah. There is a fairytale quality to the account, with the baby described as having a body as ‘white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful’. The birth of the child sent his father, Lamech, into a spin. He assumed from the baby’s appearance that the child was an angel. More modern interpretations of the text take a less whimsical approach, assuming the baby’s ‘whiteness’ is an indication that Noah had albinism.
The Reverend William Archibald Spooner, famous (perhaps apocryphally) for proposing a toast to our ‘queer old dean’ rather than to the royal lady intended (among other malapropisms), also had the condition.
Albinism is a hereditary condition affecting about one in 17,000 people that results from a lack, or a decreased amount, of tyrosinase, an enzyme necessary for the production of the pigment melanin. This lack of pigment means that people born with the condition may have white or very light hair, pale eyes, and very pale skin. While the popular image of someone with albinism is as red-eyed, most have blue eyes—although eye colour in those with albinism can range from pinkish through to violet, and even to hazel or brown. Apart from the effect on the production of pigment, the other main impact is on the opticfibre pathways, and people with albinism often have poor vision.
In the past, albinism was considered freakish enough for P. T. Barnum to include a family with the condition in his American Museum and in his travelling sideshow, along with bearded ladies and conjoined twins. Folklore and myth regarding albinism include the beliefs that individuals with it can conduct electricity, read minds, and see in the dark.
Less benign misconceptions are that those with albinism are of below-average intelligence and are sterile. In the Dutch language, kakerlak, which also means cockroach, is the word for someone with albinism. More poetically, in some Native American cultures, they are called ‘Children of the Moon’, because of their aversion to strong sunlight.
During the rise of Nazism in Germany, those with albinism were maligned as ‘effeminate’, and so were despised. More recently, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code drew on the popularly negative connotations of those with the condition in his portrayal of Silas, the murderous albino monk.
IN A CITY LIKE MELBOURNE, where people have come from across the hemisphere and from every continent, the range of skin colours among us is nothing short of remarkable. As the lunchtime crowds swarm across the streets, a cross-section of the races of man and the medleys of skin colour form a mosaic: from the blue-blackness of someone who hails from the horn of Africa to the pale-skinned, yellow-haired individual whose forbears were Vikings, and all the shades in between. You would need to plunder a paint catalogue to find names to accurately define the variations in tone, despite the fact that, of our 30,000-odd chromosomes, only two of them carry the handful of genes that determine our skin colour. Yet, somehow, the colour of a person’s skin, for many of us, brings with it a whole range of associations that have no basis in fact but merely provide convenient shorthand to compartmentalise difference.
Despite all the permutations of skin colour represented in my city, I find my eyes are still drawn irresistibly to those whose skin tone varies dramatically from my own. There is something about that difference that catalyses my interest, my fascination. Or is it simply my innate racism? Difference excites us all at some level, I suppose—a difference in gender, in status, in sexual orientation. But I am disappointed in my own shallowness—that such a superficial difference as skin colour attracts my gaze so unerringly.
Whiteness is my default position: the times I have spent in countries where my particular shade of pale is not the norm have been brief—and
