The title of the thread pretty much sums it up. I’m taking a class about Modern India right now and once again the society I’m learning about has a bias against darker skin. Has there ever, in all of human history, been a society in which darker skin is an asset, and lighter skin in discriminated against?
I’m guessing no. I know that part of the reason for the bias against darker skin is that those with darker skin are darker because they have to spend more time working in the sun, a result of their lower status.
America is all kinds of weird. For example, black people have traditionally been treated as lower-status than white people. But white people with a lovely deep tan are currently treated as higher-status than pasty-pale white people.
The explanation I have seen for this is that menial labour now tends to be indoors, so having a tan means that you have the spare time to go outside to sunbathe, swim or whatever, instead of being stuck in an office from 9 to 5 every day.
That’s a generalization you are going to have a hard time supporting. Historically the reverse was certainly true. Today, when I see a dark-skinned pro athlete [high status] with a black girlfriend/wife, she is generally light-skinned and less “negroid” in appearance.
I tentatively offer the possible example of the Ainu/Utari in Japan, who are a comparatively low-status group and who have sometimes been described as lighter-skinned than most Japanese. But I haven’t seen any serious ethnographic studies about them and don’t really know how the Ainu compare to other Japanese, complexion-wise.
Of course, it isn’t their skin color per se that diminishes the status of the Ainu in Japanese society; it’s just one aspect of their “difference”.
Likewise, weren’t the comparatively fair-skinned northern European Gauls and Goths looked down upon by the ethnic Italians who dominated Imperial Roman society? Again, though, it wasn’t specifically because of their skin color; that was just one aspect of their overall “barbarian” image.
Isn’t this mostly just a conscious and deliberate form of “reverse” prejudice, though? AFAICT, American black society has traditionally shared the larger society’s prejudice against darker skin. The documentary film A Question of Color explored this issue:
Again, it’s irrelevant. Whether you say status or class, a tan is irrelevant. To some shallow people it matters, but for the most part it doesn’t really make much of a difference.
I doubt that’s an American thing, since Coco Chanel is generally credit with popularizing a tanned look. It used to be that being extra pale was desirable because it was a sign you didn’t have to work in the outdoors for a living; later on being pale became a sign you worked all the time and having a tan was evidence you had time to relax in the sun. Fun stuff.
and there isn’t a undercurrent of resentment among the african american community that the wife is “high” or “yellow” ? 150 years ago she would’ve been regarded as a “house nigger” and a bastard child who is ostracized from the core of the african american community - from the white one as well. As adamant as some white families are about their children marrying white, some black families are equally adamant of their children marrying black. The pressures of attending howard, spellman, etc. are partially to preserve identity but also to meet an intelligent girl/boy of the same race to foster marriage. Kobe & co. hanging out with white girls is just one small sector of the african american community. I assure you there’s another part of the african american community that has intense cultural pride and view the superstars’ actions as “selling out” or even “sleeping with the devil.”
Apart from just women, if you walk into a predominantly african american neighborhoods like compton, parts of brooklyn, south-side chicago, hotlanta, charlotte, anacostia in DC, etc, you would find them more accepting of a darker man than a whiter man. If you walk up to a black club, you’d be hard pressed to make your way past the bouncer if you were a white guy.
So there are instances where a black man has an advantage over a white man, for sure. However with regards to the OP, to say that there’s an entire society that does so, that would be more difficult to say.
In the U.S., perhaps, but not elsewhere. In the Philippines, for example, darker skin due to the sun is a symbol of lower status - it means that you have to work outside.
In Western countries, it was much the same until about the 1920’s - a tan meant manual labor, and thus lower class. This changed as Western countries urbanized, and the lower class started to spend their time indoors, in factories and the like. A tan then became a symbol of higher status because only those who didn’t have to work inside and/or had leisure time to spend outdoors got tans.
One could argue that in Malaysia, the “Bumiputra” policies favour the darker skinned natives over the lighter skinned ethnic Chinese. This example is somewhat flawed, however, because ethnic Indians are also equally disadvantaged.
A “house nigger” was given more status than the “field negroes”, so whatever resentment the latter had towards the former was in response to disparities in treatment and esteem. Lighter skinned blacks weren’t looked down upon or viewed as inferior as much as they were viewed as snobs and overly loyal to whites.
This is different from what the OP is talking about.
Anecdotal: I had a friend, black, who went to Stanford. Now it’s pretty well established that everybody who goes to Stanford is smart, no matter what color.
She joined a black sorority. You should see the picture of the group of them. If you didn’t know they were all black, you would never guess.