The Origins of Colourism

Bit of an overly long read but some interesting anthropological studies:

…It’s notable that the issue of colourism in beauty norms has become a feminist issue in large part because of the sexually dimorphic nature of the phenomenon. As Lawton writes, “Colourism is a feminist issue because black men are allowed to be dark-skinned where women are not.” Which is to say that women in African American communities generally don’t perceive lighter skin in males to be any more desirable than darker skin—so that males can “get away” with being dark, even as they generally exhibit a preference for lighter skin in female mates. But this invites the question as to why slavery and oppression would arbitrarily lead to a male desire for female skin but have no corresponding effect on the opposite form of attraction. Clearly, some further explanation is needed.

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“As to the colour, dark brown is decidedly a disadvantage,” noted the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in 1929, describing male desires for women in the Trobriand Islands off the east coast of New Guinea, “In the magic of washing and in other beauty formulae, a desirable skin is compared with white flowers, moonlight, and the morning star.” This description is specific to the Trobriand Islander’s own skin tones, and did not apply to white visitors, whose skin was perceived as too white. Ian Hogbin, similarly, wrote in The Island of Menstruating Men: Religion in Wogeo, New Guinea, the ideal skin tone was seen as “bright and clear as the petals of a flower,” but, “Europeans are most emphatically not envied for their blond coloring, which is regarded as far too reminiscent of albinos.” East of New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean lies the Solomon Islands, where Beatrice Blackwood wrote of the Buka in 1935, “In discussing with the men what physical attributes they considered desirable in their women, it emerged that they prefer a light skin, especially one with a reddish tinge, which is much less common than the darker brown.”

Leaving the Melanesian Pacific altogether and travelling northwest to Asia, we find a similar pattern. In Singapore, Cambodia and Thailand, billboards everywhere project images of light-skinned women smearing cream over their faces. Chinese people seem to be particularly judgemental on this subject; and for over a thousand years, the Geisha has been a symbolic focal point of perfection in beauty in Japan, her face smothered in white bird droppings or other whitening products. One Japanese scholar described the perfect skin tone as reflecting the “beautiful tuberculosis patient whose skin is pale and almost transparent.” The wealthiest Japanese men often are said to marry the lightest skinned females, paralleling sub-continental practises in India and Bangladesh.

Ancient Aztec codices in Central America revealed the use of cosmetics by women to attain a lighter skin, and paintings from ancient Egypt depicted women with lighter skin than males. In the Arab world, more broadly, one early traveller noted, “The highest praise is perhaps ‘She is white as snow.’” In North America, one Hopi chief commented, “We say that a woman with a dark skin may be half man.”

In subsaharan Africa, it’s much the same. Writing in 1910, Moritz Merker stated of the most sought after Masai women of Kenya and Tanzania, “Further requirements for being regarded as beautiful are an oval face, white teeth, black gums, a skin color as light as possible.” John Barnes wrote in 1951 of Ngoni in Malawi, “Young men say that what they like in a girl is a light skin colour, a pretty face, and the ability to dance and to copulate well.” Of the inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, among the most isolated people in Africa, another anthropologist wrote, “the generally admired type is a light-skinned girl of somewhat heavy build, with prominent breasts and large, firm buttocks.” Speaking of the strategic posturing of jealous women in Zambia, C.M.M. White recorded that, “dark-skinned women conscious of their possible disadvantage have been heard to tell men that light-skinned women will be found to be sexually unsatisfying.”

This pattern amounts to more than mere anecdote. In a 1986 report published in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, anthropologists Pierre van den Berghe and Peter Frost dusted off some understudied ethnographic archives contained in the Yale-based Human Relations Area Files, and found that in the great majority of societies for which there is data, lighter skinned females do in fact feature as the beauty ideal, whereas no clear pattern emerges for female’s preferences for male skin tone.

There were only three societies identified by the anthropologists that reportedly didn’t subject female beauty to a colourist evaluation, but in each of these cases the evidence was ambiguous as to beauty norms. Even counting these three cases as negative findings, van den Berghe and Frost concluded that there is an overwhelming cross-cultural pattern of colourism in male sexual desires that places lighter skin females above darker members of their community. They also argued that Western contact couldn’t possibly explain the phenomenon due to its ubiquity throughout the historical records of Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Aztecs, and in societies not colonized by the West or with limited contact. Van den Berghe and Frost calculate the probability of their data set arising by chance to be “less than one in 100 million.”

The two researchers also found that lighter-skinned women are not only preferred in almost every society, they also have lighter skin compared to men in most societies, and this anomaly could not be explained by sun exposure—which suggests that some force in evolutionary history has selected for lighter women.

In particular, Van den Berghe and Frost found that women tend to have the lightest tone of skin during early adulthood, during the most fertile period of her menstrual cycle, and when they are not pregnant—in other words, when a woman is most likely to conceive: “There appears, in short, to be a linkage not only between pigmentation and sex, but between light pigmentation and fecundability in women.”

They hypothesized, firstly, that the correlation between lighter skin complexion and fertility led to a genetically programmed learning bias in males, which usually manifests as a cultural preference for lighter skinned females. But once this colourist discrimination took place on the cultural level, they further hypothesized, sexual selection caused the further lightning of female skin pigmentation, explaining the lighter pigmentation we now find in females as compared with males.

This theory of gene-culture coevolution is not without its critics. And contradictory findings exist as to the difference in male-versus-female skin tones and the linkage between menstruation and skin tones. But what seems to be firmly established is that the cross-cultural bias for lighter skin does in fact exist and that it arises for reasons independent of oppressive forces exerted by the West. The question then becomes to what degree oppressive historical forces have further intensified a colourism toward women that already existed.

This is not an easy empirical question to answer, because hardly any longitudinal ethnographic studies exist on the extent of colourism in these communities before and after contact with the white world. One rare example does exist, however, in the form of a 1954 studyproduced by anthropologist Edwin Ardener, in regard to the Ibo of eastern Nigeria. Ardener noted that, “In Ibo culture…yellowish or reddish complexions are considered more beautiful than the darker, ‘blacker’ complexions,” and reproduced the statement of one Ibo man: “Well, you know that a thing that is ugly is first of all really black…You don’t want people to laugh at you and say, ‘Is that your wife?’”

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Lost amidst the overflowing storm of contradictory grievances and the sweeping tide of politically motivated commentary, meanwhile, is a nuanced conversation about the actual origins of colourism. Such a discussion might help make people appreciate that the admiration for many different skin hues observed in modern Western societies is actually an unusual but thoroughly welcome development.

Source: The Origins of Colourism