No, but I saw the episode of Frank’s Place where they mentioned the paper bag test; they also mentioned something called “Capital C Creole” (which was what you were if your skin was lighter than the bag).
The movie “Jungle Fever” has some scenes about this. One woman describes how, because she was darker-skinned than other black women she wasn’t considered as pretty.
Also, there’s a scene where Wesley Snipes’s character thell his Italian-american girflriend she doens’t want to have kids with ther because he didn’t want quadroons or octoroons as kids. When she replies that she is darker skinned than her black ex-wife (and mother of hs kids) he says “yeah, but in my mind, they are black”.
While I’m not sure - remember, I was raised outside of India - it’s certainly possible that’s where the roots lie. No one has ever mentioned such a thing to me, but there certainly has been…classism against those “South Indians what don’t even speak Hindi.” I’ve been guilty of it myself, in the past.
South Indians and North Indians don’t actually have that much in common. Divided by language, culture, sometimes even religion, and definitely in the ways we express the religion.
So it’s possible. Ascenray might know better.
So how popular is this in the world at large? I know it’s popular in India, but apparently there may be an explanation that has nothing to do with the reasons it happens here in the U.S. So is it always cultural? Are there places where being darker is considered better?
Because, based on what little I’ve heard about it, I’d started to wonder if it was some biological prejudice, similar to how we prefer symmetrical faces or men prefer women with certain waist-hip ratios or even how signs of youthfulness is valued in a mate. You know, that maybe, some time in the past, being lighter had some sort of evolutionary advantage, or at least was tied in with one. I do remember being taught that humans originally had darker skin, and that our lighter skin gives us an advantage in getting vitamin D in our less equatorial climes.
But, if there are places where the issue is reversed, that would tend to disprove that hypothesis.
Well, one thing to consider is that female attraction to light-skinned males seems a lot less pronounced than the converse. In fact, I think the bias swings in dark male’s favor if we look at certain populations. Preferences towards “tall, dark, and handsome” men suggests we are conditioned to associate masculinity with dark skin and weakness (typically associated with femininity) with paleness. When racial stereotyping overlaps with this already ingrained way of thinking, it leaves us little room to suggest there’s a biological basis for these biases.
Based on our current trajectory as a species, it seems like we’re destined towards the middle of the color spectrum. Intermixing is at unprecedented levels and I see no evidence that those at the color extremes (e.g. very white and very black) are reproductively outcompeting caramel colored peoples. With all the Vit D fortified food we’re eating, pale skin no longer imparts a significant advantage and in fact is a detriment when you factor in skin cancer risk.