that I think I’m alone. Photographers and clothes stylists appear to dote on the contrast of white and black: think of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of nude men, their sculptured bodies appearing like negatives of each other, studies in sameness and difference. His now alinost-iconic images continue to exert a strong aesthetic influence, evidenced in fashion spreads in glossy magazines that often feature a Scandinavian-looking beauty in the arms of a coal-black Adonis.
WHEN TRAVELLING IN VIETNAM, I became aware that pale skin is deemed attractive there—especially by young women. In that hot, humid climate, they take great care to cover up their skin to protect it from the darkening effects of the sun. The ubiquitous motorbike is the most popular form of transport, and apart from the sheer number of these machines, and the fact that whole families seem to travel on them, the most notable thing is the way that the young women who ride on them are dressed. Adopting gangster-chic, they pull on long gloves that reach almost to their shoulders; their hats are worn low over their faces, and kerchiefs are tied outlaw-style below their eyes. Our guide in Ho Chi Minh City, a vivacious young woman called Anh, joked that she didn’t have a boyfriend because she was ‘too brown’.
As well as being a guide for tourists, Anh worked in a local orphanage. She was slightly bemused by the apparent preference that childless Western couples, coming to Vietnam in the hope of adopting a baby, exhibited towards the darker-skinned Khmer babies at the orphanage. She and the other orphanage staff would try to draw the attention of the prospective adoptive parents to the fairer-skinned babies, whom the locals considered more beautiful.
Like the young women I saw in Vietnam, my grandmother’s generation would barely venture outside without gloves and extravagantly large hats to protect their skin from the sun. Freckles and tanning were blemishes to be blanched with buttermilk, if you were careless enough to expose your skin to the sun’s damaging beams.
When I was a teenager, we offered ourselves up to the same sun with a sensual slavishness that would have appalled my grandmother and her sisters. My friends and I envied those girls with naturally olive skin: our firm belief was that tans made us look thinner and added to our attractiveness just as surely as a perky bosom. Sunburn, blisters, and skin that peeled off like sheets of dried glue didn’t deter us from achieving our aim of the perfect tan. We’d sit in a row in the sunniest position during our school lunchbreak, the skirts of our uniforms hitched high, socks pulled low, to get the nut-brown legs we desired.
Now, of course, we know the dangers of melanoma and skin cancer and, while some of us heed the warnings and cover up in the sun, rates of skin cancer are still very high in Australia. Some opt for spray-on tans, bending over in G-strings to submit themselves to the mist of oil and pigment that will give them that all-over burnish even in their crevasses and creases, no matter if the sun’s rays would shine there naturally.
IN EUROPEAN CULTURE, the idea of the dusky maiden and the delights that she might offer to a white-skinned paramour was enhanced by tales brought back by sailors on voyages to the Pacific, such as those undertaken by Captain Cook. The perceived promiscuity and lasciviousness of the black woman was the source of many a fantasy for European man.
This idea appears still to have currency, according to an article in the New Yorker by Zadie Smith, a British novelist with an English father and a Jamaican mother. Smith wrote, ‘If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin.’ Not just any Paul Gauguin, of course, but one from his Tahitian period when he was painting brown-skinned women with frangipanis behind their ears, seminude, and reclining on beaches or holding large fruits. It might be in the form of a valentine card, Smith says, or wrapping paper, but it will come. Smith went on to describe a holiday with her lover where she completely destroyed his fantasy of being on a tropical island with his very own brown girl. Rather than the sarong-swathed nymph of his imagination, Smith turned into a swollen, whining wet blanket when she found herself to be allergic to ‘the whole country’ of Tonga.
Perhaps it is a case of the grass always being greener; in some Melanesian cultures, it is women with fairer skin who are favoured by men. They are deemed to be more sexually receptive than their darker-skinned counterparts, and therefore more desirable.
AS PEOPLE AND POPULATIONS become more mobile, it becomes less and less possible to guess someone’s nationality by the colour of their skin. How you sound is more reliable in determining your nationality than what you look like. Skin tone may hold a clue to your ancestors’ birthplace, but open your mouth and the sounds that issue forth will place you unerringly where you were bred if not born.
An article published in the Scotsman newspaper in early 2004 quoted a Scottish national survey that found that the majority of Scots were more likely to accept someone with dark skin and a Scottish accent as being Scottish than they were of accepting someone from England who had settled permanently in Scotland as being Scottish. The oldest enmities obviously die hardest.
From the earliest times, differing skin colour has been viewed as a problem with no obvious solution. When Europeans first began encountering those with darker-hued skin than their own, various theories were put forward to account for humans coming in different colours. Of equal interest to them was what could be inferred about a person from the darkness or paleness of their skin. Of course, there was a vested interest in defining non-Europeans as lesser beings than Europeans. Predictably racist theories, taking the view that the darker-skinned races were less evolved than the white man, gained support and extended to the hypothesis that those races were a different (and inferior) species altogether.
With the Enlightenment and the elevation of science that it brought, these views of the races, and their inherent differences, were supported by ‘scientific’ theories and evidence that persisted into the 20th century. In 1927, in his pamphlet titled ‘The Characters of the Human Skin in Their Relations to Questions of Race and Health’, H. J. Fleure, a professor of geography and anthropology at the University College of Wales, acknowledged the common ancestry of the world’s peoples, but took great pains to explain the different characteristics of the races. His view was that it was the superiority of the European environment that accounted for the more ‘agile brain of the European’. By contrast, the ‘specialization of both Mongolian and Negro’ skin, limiting ‘the multiplication of sensory endings’, allowed for their survival in the sweltering climate of the tropics and was responsible for their ‘lesser general irritability’ and ‘greater equanimity of temperament’.
Because Europeans lacked these adaptations of the skin, Fleure lectured on the unsuitability of tropical climates for the European. He suggested the compromise of a ‘sheltered life’ for those daring or foolhardy enough to venture to the ‘torrid’ regions and encouraged the ‘employment of coloured native field-labour’. Naturally, he warned, the ‘social dangers’ of such an arrangement should not be underestimated.
How could any reasonable person possibly take offence at these carefully constructed arguments? Such a flurry of pseudoscientific claims dressed up in ‘rational’ language carefully avoids any blatantly crude racist rhetoric. Dispiritingly, equally racist views are expressed in less rational terms on the websites of White Pride and similar organisations today.
THE REASONS for different races exhibiting different skin tones is still of interest to scientists and anthropologists. They seek to understand why such variation has developed between various populations in different latitudes of the globe. With poignant and yet naive simplicity, some even preface or append their theories with the hope that, by reducing skin colour to a response to environmental conditions, racism will somehow become a thing of the past.
The colour of human skin is mainly determined by the amount and size of the melanin molecules found within it. Layers of fat and the presence of blood vessels also play a part. Melanin is a pigment produced by cells called melanocytes, which are present in the inner layers of
