Melanophobia

In the recent months, there has been significant attention in the popular imagination and discourse about racism, particularly against Black people in the US and other places. Mostly, Black refers to the people who migrated (often forced by others or by circumstance) from Africa in the recent past. By recent past, I mean a few hundred years. Not the past few decades or thousands of years ago, since all of us are descendants of people who migrated from Africa 60,000 years ago.

The discussion did spill over to other ‘black’ people (or brown or wheatish¹ as Indian matrimonial sites mention) a bit. The obsession with fair skin in India got some attention too, with movie stars being derided for promoting products that promise fair skin. FMCG companies have also changed the names of their products, replacing the word fair² with other words.

While all this is good, necessary, and important, I suspect they only scratch the surface and treat the symptoms. We do not seem to go to the core issue at all. This is a topic that has bothered me for several years³.

What is the core issue? The core issue is not “racism”. Racism is just one of the symptoms. All of us are status seeking tribal monkeys and will do anything to put down others and feel superior. Racism is one such weapon, that is all. Nationalism, Male chauvinism, caste-ism, class-ism, and all such isms arise for the same reasons. So, let us give up (not really give up, but keep aside for now) on the ‘racism’ part of it.

To put down the African migrants, the most visible marker was picked, which was ‘being dark’. All the other arguments about group differences⁶ in intelligence, they being sub-humans etc. start there. While we complain that AI systems classify Africans as great apes, we should first wonder if that thought did not arise in our heads ever. Be truthful. Just as AI systems see a pattern of dark skin and identify those objects, our brains also do that. Conditioning by society is only part of the story.

IMO, the solution to this could be: To acknowledge that thought when it arises, examine it carefully, ascribe a reason as ‘Of course humans are part of great apes and evolved from one such species. Therefore, that some of us have a similar appearance is not a surprise. That others do not look like that does not mean they have ‘evolved more’ to become a different (forget better) species; it just means they interbred with other similar species⁷; their genes did what they usually do and some surface level changes have appeared in them. For historical reasons explained in books like Guns, Germs and Steel, some races moved forward regarding technology development sooner than others, that is all’, and be done with it. Teach this to enough children for a generation or two and we might have a better society.⁴

Okay, I digressed a bit from the skin argument. Let us come back to it right away. Why did it emerge that ‘skin color’ could be picked as a marker for inferiority/superiority?

How much of it is learned versus natural? Historically, people have been like that, no? Is it possible that humans are attracted to fair skin by nature? May be since it is shiny / reflects light well etc.? Is there something core to our psyche that has a preference for ‘light’ over ‘dark’? In other words, has there been any hardwiring done by evolution in our brain to prefer things that reflect light better than things that do not reflect light? While that applies to anything we observe, specifically about our behavior with other humans, was there something about lighter skin color (less melanin — I had to justify the title somewhere) that indicated it worked better for reproductive ability?

A few disparate observations on this:

• Fair skinned people seem to have won the battle of perception throughout history⁵. Long before European colonialism, why did India have skin-based discrimination? Why did Aryans feel superior to Dravidians (which is what all our mythology is about)? Why did Dravidians readily (or even if not so) accept these stories, about demons being dark-skinned? Why are lower caste people predominantly dark in color? Even now, look around at your apartment complex (be it any city in India). Why are more domestic helpers dark in complexion than the people that employ them? Dark-skinned mothers in children’s play areas are by default assumed to be nannies, while fair-skinned nannies are assumed to be mothers. They are the exceptions that prove the rule.
• Why are fairness products popular in Africa? In my travels there, I have seen multiple advertisement hoardings promising fair skin. Colonialism may have exacerbated it, but I suspect it was there from before. The relatively lighter-skinned people would have been considered more attractive even before the Europeans went there (I suspect).
• Dark/Black as evil has been part of all mythology, even in places where the skin color of all people was dark. Or is my understanding wrong here? If it was about “Us versus Other”, is there any mythology that shows Pale Skin as evil? Is the fear of black rooted in the fear of the dark? (Prehistorically, people would have been more at risk of being attacked by predators or by enemies when in the dark, he said. Through evolution, humans have therefore developed a tendency to fear darkness and therefore anything dark), which over time got coded into our psyche?
• Tabula Rasa level babies (before they can be conditioned) show a preference for ‘prettier’ faces (well, based on my own observation as well as some research — the research is not on skin color per se and does not specifically talk about it). Is ‘pretty’ just a socially created construct or is there more to it that is hardwired? Particularly, if ‘fair skin’ is considered ‘pretty’, how much of it is conditioning versus hard-wired? [A related research argues the opposite — Babies show preference for faces of the same race — Not newborns, but 3 month olds]
• With the single sample research I did at home, my daughter was not exposed to dark/fair skin concept at all till she was 2.5 years old⁸. My wife and I were very careful in conversations with her. However, she still seemed to have developed a preference for fair skin. In board books with photos of multi-ethnic groups of children, she started preferring fair-skinned children to dark-skinned. More straight hair than curly hair etc. This also happened around the time she started slowly interacting with friends in the apartment on her own. I do suspect one particular friend of hers was influencing these things, but I wonder how much of it is that versus and innate preference that just got woken up.
• There are anecdotes of even someone like Nelson Mandela wondering for a moment if he would have a safe flight when he saw that the pilot was a Black person. Well, he, being another Mahatma, admitted to this and immediately corrected it as “The thing I fought for through my life is residing right inside me”. In his case, it is entirely possible that this thought was purely out of the inferiority thrust upon him since childhood. But is that all? Or is there something deeper in the psyche that we should acknowledge and set aside? Like we do for several cognitive fallacies? Or when we see a rope, get afraid it could be a snake, and then brush aside that thought.

To conclude (rather ‘end’ this rambling since there is no ‘conclusion’ per se), I am sure there is scholarly work that has explored most of what I have raised in this post. I have been lazy to search for them and read them. If you know of any, do pass them on.

Some thought experiment as we end: Assuming you are not already from one of those fairest-skinned races, would you prefer to be more fair skinned than you are now? If you could magically mate with anyone in the world with no ramifications at all (regarding social, health impact etc. — no one ever knows about it, including that mate), would you prefer a fair-skinned person or a dark-skinned one? (I did this and I was not extremely pleased with myself — My Super-Ego, Ego and Id seem to be in complete conflict here).

1 In the place I grew up, you could buy Gujrati/Punjabi wheat from private shops or wheat from PDS shops. The ones from PDS shops would be darker and the chapatis you make out of them would turn out darker. So, whenever people say ‘wheatish’ complexion, I get this question in my head — Which wheat? Gujrati/Punjabi wheatish or PDS shop wheatish?

2 Products like Fair & Lovely have been part of the culture and it is sad and unFair (ha!) that they should be replaced as knee-jerk

3 I grew up in a family as the only “dark skinned” member and one of the few “dark skinned” members even in the extended family. We “dark skinned” cousins used to sulk and hang out together in large family gatherings like weddings where one of us (mostly a girl though) would hear a remark like “why did this one alone turn out dark”, “I think the nurse in the hospital replaced the baby with one from a fisherwoman” (which I realized later was stolen by Sunil Gavaskar’s biography), “who will marry you” etc. and do the group-sulking thereafter. We grew up feeling inferior throughout childhood and parts of us still feel inferior at some moments.

4 Sure, this super-simplifies things, but that is not the main argument of this post, so please bear with me.

5 This might indicate that fair-skinned people have been ‘superior’ to dark-skinned people throughout history. That is not the way to look at it. Fair-skinned people have been able to convince dark-skinned people throughout history that they are inferior, is how I would put it.

6 To be clear, I am not in favor of completely being blind to studying group differences. There are definitely merits to it, but we should be vigilant about the interpretation of whatever results come out of it.

7 I am not too sure of the answers to these: Were all early people who moved out of Africa dark-skinned? Did they turn fair after moving to Europe? Or were the white-skinned tribes from Africa moving to Europe? How about the people who came to India?

8 I know it is rude, but thankfully no grandparent of hers lived with us.