I feel like a total dweeb asking in this particular discussion but cite? I’ve never read anything that would suggest that and I’m honestly curious.
The “paper bag test”…?
Never heard of it - what is it?
Nevermind… read the link.
That’s just awful
I’m not even sure I have those mags at home any more… back in the '80s and '90s, I was in charge of “Marvel news” for several fanzines, so I would dutifully read every Marvel Age (I think that was the name), Wizard interviews and so forth. This was in one of those interviews.
I’ve also done inks for several friends (fanzine covers, mostly) and have had to drag Dad’s old b&w comics to show the editor that You Do Not Paint Black People Black: a good inker uses the same amount of ink for a b&w as if it was going to get 4-color, partly in case it ever does and partly because otherwise the black people just become blobs. It’s much easier to leave a biggish white space and work “a lot of shadow” into it than to cover most of the space, but leaving just thin lines to indicate where expression lines and muscles go (plus this gives the impression of being a photo negative).
IIRC, Cecil did a column on something similar to this, and he noted that every race gave preference to the lighter skinned representatives.
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White male chiming in, grew up down South, then went to a black college.
Definitely observed darker blacks being criticized for being darker than their lighter-skinned peers.
Never in a conversation I was a direct party to, although I was hanging out with some people who had that discussion.
Never ONCE saw the opposite happen, although I am drawn inescapably to the conclusion that if one group talks smack about a second group the second group will occasionally talk smack about the first group.
So, empirically, I can neither confirm nor deny the OP, but I can confirm to converse of the OP.
IMHO, however, what the OP mentions has occurred.
As an aside, my biggest revelation about American blacks from the US Southland gained while going to a black college was that they seem to think about race. All. The. Time.
Seriously, the students I was in school with thought about race more than I thought about sex… even more than I thought about sex when I was 13, and guys think about sex A LOT.
For many African-Americans, going to an HBCU is one of the first times outside of say, going to a big black church church or living in a black majority city where EVERYONE in the institution is black, and from a variety of backgrounds, doing all kinds of jobs. It’s a racial crucible that makes you re-examine not just race, but your gender, heritage, ethnicity, nationality, politics, sexuality, religion and socioeconomic background as it relates to race. You might truly start see the unity and diversity within our (presumed) racial culture for the first time. This was how it was for me.
I highly recommend that blacks send their children to their local HBCU for undergrad education before moving on to whatever grad school experience awaits. Nothing in the world like it. It is A DIFFERENT WORLD.
P.S. I think black people think about race. All. The. Time. outside HBCUs. You’re just a bit more vocal about it in college. You tend to “act blacker” at an HBCU.
Oh, with regards to the OP, you can see a bit more of the pathology of intraracial bigotry regarding light-skinned versus dark-skinned blacks in A SOLDIER’S STORY, with the late great(s) Howard Rollins and Adolph Caesar… and Denzel Washington, of course. And SOMEBODY tell me whether the great big black MP with no speaking role who comes in and arrests Denzel at the end is an uncredited Michael Clarke Duncan or not.
I personally suspect this is reflective of the pervasiveness of white privilege and white supremacy, but I’d be willing tio hear evidence otherwise.
That would be the standard answer in the U.S. and it may very well be true. However, the stories that I have heard from around the world suggest that the answer may need to be flipped around. We have anecdotes and probably some really data out there about the preference for lighter skin from such divergent places as India, South America, and even in Africa. I have never heard of any culture in the world that prefers darker skin over lighter skin. It is a big place so I would guess there would be some somewhere. Where are they?
I realize that this question may be taken offensively but it isn’t meant to be. I am honestly interested in an academic sense. I asked a similar question in GQ once and no one gave much of an answer at all.
All three of those places were colonized by whites. When the ruling elite looks a certain way, that tends to leave a long-lasting impression in the native population. Plus, with the global dissemination of images which promote the Western standard of beauty, everyone’s idea of attractiveness is probably skewed towards that standard.
What we need to find is data on populations left relatively untouched by European imperialism and cut off from the glut of Western pop culture. That’s going to be hard to find.
Not hard to find at all. Just look at ancient Egyptian or Indian art.
I can think of only one example.
Average American white people. We’ve been frying ourselves under the sun forever and in tanning beds for decades. Even after years of hearing about how it will cause cancer, we still expose ourselves to it because we like the way it looks. It wasn’t until his second skin cancer scare that my husband finally agreed to use sunscreen. My brothers work construction and wear their excessive bronziness as a badge of honor. I stopped getting tan on purpose when I was 25 years old. But I admit to being careless about sunscreen. I SPF 50 my kids, and they still got tan this summer. And, I find myself thinking they look cute that way. When I was younger and dating, I did not find men with fair skin attractive physically. A tan blonde was ok, but darker skin/hair/eyes always did it for me.
Now, we can spray on a tan to avoid the UV exposure and still get something like the look. Will we stop when we find out that the chemicals used cause cancer? Probably not. Because we like the way it looks.
Also, aren’t women always falling head over heels for the “tall, dark, and handsome” type?
Testerone production is related to increased melanin content, so it makes sense (evolutionarily speaking) for women to select darker-skinned men. One argument that I read said that “blondeness” is associated with females for this exact reason…thereby explaining why men slobber over blondes even if their faces are hideous (Ann Coulter lovers, are you reading this?) (The authors went further and stated that women tend to have poor mathematical and spatial reasoning because of the effects of estrogen…blonde-haired women have even more estrogen than darker-haired women…hence we get “dumb blonde” jokes :eek: )
You drop one piece of hair in a paper bag, and it proves absolutely nothing.
Nonsense. If you’re dark, you’re toiling in the fields, and if you’re light you’re part of the bureaucracy and/or aristocracy. As far as I can see, it’s like that in every culture around the world.
Thailand, for example, never has been colonized, and just googling “Thailand beauty light dark skin” I see these quotes on the very first page of the results:
"I spent time teaching in Thailand, and my students’ compliments - “wow, you have such beautiful light skin!” - completely floored me. "
"Dark isn’t cool in Thailand. And it’s not because the influence of the … The light skin means you’re not toiling in the sun and therefore of higher class. "
“Being dark skinned in Thailand represents being low on the social ladder, showing that a person does menial labor in the sun.”
“In Thailand to be dark is looked down on”
“Yet we do know that light skin colour is also associated with high status in Thailand, which does not have a colonial past”
Hmmmm . . . maybe ancient people observed that those who are habitually out in the sun have a habit of sickening and dying at an early age, and possibly passing on what they might vaguely recognize as genetic abnormalities to their offspring. So perhaps society built up taboos against light-dark parings to guard the elites against biologically-based dangers, much as in the case of incest taboos and prohibitions against eating shellfish.
Some cultures have the fixation a lot stronger than others and it would be ludricrous to discount the influence of Europeans, especially with groups like African-Americans. Otherwise, the fixation in this group would just be limited to skin tone and not extend to hair texture and facial features. Eye widening is big in Asia as well. Nose jobs, too. And how can you explain why blondeness is so prized (and not just with whites), if the whole “brown skin associated with toiling in the hot sun” is the sole explanation. There’s more going on than just that.
(You read about alot of awful things on this site, but the “paper bag test” was really disturbing. What the f++king matter with people!?)
Interesting, Monstro. I never heard this claim before. I can’t say I find it too credible at the moment (I can think of a lot of obvious objections and questions that such a conclusion would raise), but I’d like to learn more about the author’s basis for coming to the conclusion that they did. Do you have a cite?