Oh yeah! I’ve “known” it all my life, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know it.* But actually I don’t know for sure if it’s universal (few things about humans are really universal, when you think about it) or if it’s more likely to happen with very different parents (aka “mixed race”), and that’s mostly what we see here in the US. There are relatively few Nigerians six generations back marrying other Nigerians six generations back in our country. Most of us born in this country to parents who were born in this country, no matter what our skin tone, are “mutts” of some sort. So maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe it’s not “are black babies really born white” but “are African-American babies born paler than their toddler skin tone most of the time?” Since “African-American” is a very different thing than “black”, and more genetically diverse, it’s a very different question.
*But again, this doesn’t mean it’s true. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know that water goes down the drain clockwise on one side of the planet and counter-clockwise on the other. Problem is, we’re all wrong. There is no coriolis effect in your sink, the direction of the swirl has to do with the location of the faucet, the speed of the flow and any imperfections in the surface. There are lots of things that “everyone knows” that are just not correct.
I seem to remember a National Geographic photo (or is it one of those Time/Life educational books? :dubious: ) of a dark-skinned mother holdeing her newborn light-skinned baby: the article stated the child’s skin darkens over time.
I say an omnimax movie just a week or so ago that made the same claim: that melanin required exposure to light to pigment, and that there was no way to tell the race of a fetus or immediately post-birth newborn by skin color-they’re all pink.
I’ve never been present at any birth other than my own, though, so I dunno. The film seemed pretty accurate about everything else.
My mother is a retired newborn nursery nurse, and I had heard a number of stories over the years, so I asked her about this.
She says for mixed race babies, where one parent is black and the other is white, that the babies often come out a lighter color than what they turn out. There are parts of the skin which are darker and give an indication of the final color. These areas include the genitals, back of the fingernails and some creases. She said she saw one baby from a black mother and a white father which was all white, with no indication of any blackness.
She has seen some babies from dark African parents who were born as black as the parents.
Straight out of the oven light-skinned kids seem to look darker (purplish). At least the ones I’ve seen.
My daughter (mixed as hell) was born with very dark hair and purple skin. She then started bleaching out. Her hair started to turn lighter, the same happened with her skin and eyes. Then her hair and eyes turned much lighter and her skin darkened a bit. She’s now light-skinned (mediterranean), medium blue eyes and her blonde hair keeps getting lighter. There was no way to predict any of this when she was born, and I have no way to predict how she’ll look in 5 years, let alone as an adult.
Most mixed kids I know look dark right at birth, lighter skinned until they are about 5 years old, and then they look more like the color they’ll have as adults. I have no experience with kids of purely black parents though.
We had a color wheel at the hospital where I worked such that we could compare the pigment of momma, and poppa, if he was around, and compute the proper setting for dippin the baby so they’d match. Kinda like what Benjamin-Moore and those other paint folks do.
Dammit, I’m having trouble finding the cites, but I’ll just say it and possibly be corrected later.
I’ve seen pictures of a chimera baby, who has two distinctly different skin pigments split right down the middle. In other words, split left vs. right down the chest. It wasn’t as dramatic as black and white, but yes two different colors.
I don’t know if that really fits with this thread but that baby was in a documentary called* I Am My Own Twin*. I believe the child was a hermaphrodite.
FWIW, Tiger Woods’ child is at most 1/4 African, 1/2 Swedish/European, and 1/4 Thai (which is often a mix of ethnic Chinese and Thai). And so it looks like a perfectly blended little child, who will probably grow up to be gorgeous and able to drive a gold ball half a mile.
In an American military training film, called Medecine in Vietnam as I recall ,one part shows a black G.I.who’d been hit by napalm and had his upper skinlayers taken off.
His skin was that sort of pinky colour that we always call white when it relates to people .
One of my sisters looked “sheet white” when she was born. Now she is wheatish in color.
I was born fire engine red. Before I got baked by the Florida sun, I was the palest in the family (except for my dad).
So no, black babies aren’t born white, but they’re coloring does change as they grow up. I think it’s safe to say that there’s some darkening involved, but sometimes the color just changes–like it did in my case.
