Cite?
Haiti is a really bad example to generalize from, if you’re talking about skin tone. Reparations to France (after the war for independence) broke the country, then they moved into the USA’s sphere of influence.
Lighter-skinned people (not albinos) might be taken as having wealthy French-colonist or foreign roots, sometimes. And wealth and culture are attractive to a lot of people. Although it would help to actually be wealthy and cultured, not just light. I think speaking something other than Haitian Creole (French and English, for a start) was a stronger marker of status anyway, back in the Duvalier era, and maybe still.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that it gets bound up in class. Some of the old wealthy landowner class in Haiti look white to me (maybe not to you; Vin Diesel white, not Chris Evans white), while the poor are pretty dark on average.
Those %@^&!ing clicks! 
erectuswalksamongst.us/Chap6.html
Lighter skin itself may be a neotenous trait.
I find neoteny a bit unattractive myself (other than absurdly large eyes, because they’re sort of spookily appealing in a viper/housecat/small-primate way). I would think markers of adulthood signal nubility and virility, even aside from fertility. Even within the arguably “neotenous” Far Eastern phenotype, body hair (for example) is a marker of sexual desirability.
In any case, that’s moving off of skin tone.
ETA: or not?
That book is openly white supremacist – it advocates against “miscegenation”, advocates for white people to live separately from black people, and asserts that black people are more primitively evolved (even advocating that black people be reclassified as “homo Africanus” instead of “homo sapiens”).
Maybe I missed that part but the fact remains even black infants have lighter skin, straighter hair, etc so how would those not be neotenous traits?
Black infants have never been in the sun. Hair texture varies widely. Further, there are supposedly neotenous traits (like lack of body hair) that many African groups have but many European and Asian groups don’t … who are the hairiest men on the planet?
I don’t buy this… especially when your source is an openly white supremacist (and pseudoscientific) text.
Which would support the idea that people may have a genetic disposition biasing them in favor of the local majority. The general rule is Europeans think European skin colors look best, Asians think Asian skin colors look best, and Africans think African skin colors look best.
Anthro 101, really, lads.
[Biiandyiiii]** I think you are cherry picking. I don’t think you even read my first link, there is a long list of neotenous traits listed and you are locking in on one or two of them. Higher rates of testosterone would lead to less neoteny in a population I could prob find a cite for this but it seems pretty common sense to me. Black people have higher testosterone overall than other races:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/3455741/
I would posit that overall, isolated populations notwithstanding if you look at aggregate traits, black people have less neoteny.
You can feel free to posit this – just recognize that you’re cherry picking traits like testosterone and (perhaps) skin color, and ignoring traits (yes, you used this link as well – apparently ignoring much of it) like hairiness, nose shape, ear size/shape, joint size, skull shape, eyelash length, and molar patterns. Further, you’re lumping in groups like the San, which share many other supposed neotenous traits with Asians.
It’s not surprising that Stephen Jay Gould rejects any sort of comparison with regards to neoteny.
I think from an evolutionary standpoint, the question is: Is there an adaptive advantage to lighter skin? If there is, it would stand to reason that humans who prefer light skin have an advantage, and that trait has been bred into the population.
For example, across many (most) cultures men prefer a waist-to-hip ratio of about .7:
(NB-It’s only Wikipedia, but the body on the right is NOT attractive)
The hypothesis is that if you have that preference, your genes are more likely to be passed on. Moreover, you are far more likely to be descended from men who preferred that ratio than you are to be descended from men who preferred a waist-to-hip ratio of, say, 1.5 or .3 (because those men didn’t pass on their genes). That doesn’t mean you get to mate with your preference, it just means the preference is there.
When billions of people around the globe express the same preference, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether a preference could be adaptive and/or genetic.
What are you trying to show here?
You’ve shown that some cultures treat albinos with sympathy, for example Japan. But you’ve also shown that other cultures like Western literature portrays albinos as evil. Finally, you’ve shown some cultures treat albinos as animals from which body parts are valued as a prize or charm, similar to ivory or a rabbits foot.
If anything, it seems to show culture is a big part of how people of different skin tones are treated, but I think it is largely irrelevant since albino people are such an exception to the norm in any culture.
What? You want to repeat that after doing some basic research?
Possibly, but within the broad spectrum of Asian skin colors, from dark brown to light yellow, the preference seems to lean heavily, among Asians, towards the lighter end of the spectrum.
“Pro-light skin color” doesn’t necessarily mean “pro-white Caucasian.”
Naah, they took (a few of) those up into their own languages.
The Xhosa word for Europeans is Mlungu. It is said to have various origins - sea-scum (foam) or the white foam around the vagina of an animal in heat. Neither of those is complementary of whiteness.
I like sea-foam! And vaginal excretions in estrus is…well, it isn’t exactly polite, but it isn’t so bad. Beats being compared to pus, vomit, or the white kind of diarrhea that comes with some diseases.
It’s sort of like when the Saracens called the Crusaders dogs. Okay, dogs. We like dogs! We go hunting with them. On really cold nights, we let 'em in bed with us. “You dog!” just doesn’t have that knife-edge cutting quality an insult needs to have.
I agree this is an important question to ask if we’re pondering whether there is a biological bias towards light skin. It seems clear to me the answer is no, at least as it relates to reproduction. Are lighter-skinned mothers, for instance, more fecund than darker-skinned ones? Nope. By what mechanism would this even occur?
At its most basic, light skin is associated with less protection from the sun. This means more damage to skin over time, higher rates of certain cancers, and premature aging. Plenty of disadvantages to health and beauty are associated with this, which has effects on reproduction, both directly and indirectly. If we assume men are most attracted to young, fertile-appearing women, we can assume that women who maintain the appearance of youth the longest would be sought after the longest; these will be the ones with the most melanin. Not the pale folk.
Because of this, not only would we expect the darker ladies to reproduce more often throughout their lives (because they retain interest from men well up into menopause), but also stay bonded to the father of their children longer in life. That means more resources for their children, making them in turn more desirable mates too.
This line of reasoning makes me discount the notion that light skin imparts an advantage over dark skin. Our Eurocentric culture combined with our susceptibility to media, notions of power and status, and in-group/out-group dynamics matter more. If this is a biological thing for us, why wouldn’t we see this elsewhere in nature? Do we see animals discriminating against each other based on color?
There’s are reasons that tropical regions tend to have dark-skinned people, and colder regions tend to have light-skinned people – chiefly, dark skin helps protect one from the sun, but can result in vitamin D deficiency if there isn’t a lot of sunlight; light skin is better for vitamin D production, but worse for protection from the sun. There may be other pros and cons as well.
White people are the naked mole rats of humanity.