17 May 2001, 814 words
Selwyn Cudjoe and the Maha Sabha spokespersons are natural enemies. This is so, not because they are different, but because they are so very similar: it is their unacknowledged recognition of their own face in the other's mirror that make them dislike one another so much. So Sat Maharaj unilaterally expunges ahimsa (non-violence) from the Bhagavad Gita, and Cudjoe gives his stamp of approval to Abu Bakr by inviting him to take part in a panel discussion.
This being the case, it follows that their true statements about one another is what each will find most offensive. That is why the Maha Sabha columnists reacted so hotly to Cudjoe's statement that Hindu culture was inherently prejudiced against dark-skinned people.
The Maha Sabha's denials of this were, on the face of it, absurd. In traditional Hindu communities, caste lines are clearly delineated by complexion, with Brahmins being light-skinned and chamars being dark: in other words, skin colour has determined much of Hindus' entire social structure.
But what neither the Maha Sabha spokespersons nor Cudjoe would know (pseudo-intellectualness being one of their key similarities) is that many cultures - European, Asian and even African - have always placed a higher value on lighter skin: at least when it comes to women.
It is usual for the Caribbean intelligentsia to argue that colour-prejudice arose as a consequence of plantation slavery. Dark complexions, they say, were demonised in order to justify slavery and, in our society, dark-skinned women aren't used in commercials because of that historically created prejudice.
But it's not as simple as that. Race prejudice didn't really exist in Europe before the 16th century, bigotry usually being based on religion or ethnicity. In fact, a man "of broun coloure in al the body" was considered manly and brave.
Interestingly, in many cultures, "blackness" is equated with maleness and "whiteness" with femaleness (these terms being relative to the average complexion). In ancient Greece, a woman's pale skin represented both her beauty and her weakness, while a man's dark skin showed his virility and fighting skill. The Berti, a Sudanese people, describe women as "white, cold and soft" and men as "black, hot and hard".
This sex difference is reflected in the visual arts of the Egyptians, Etruscans, Aztecs, Chinese and Romans, where men are portrayed with darker complexions and women with fairer. (Here, then, may be the root of the modern-world myth of the African man's sexual athleticism, as well as the white and East Asian man's image otherwise.)
In a seminal paper titled, in that playful academic way, "Skin color preference, sexual dimorphism, and sexual selection: a case of gene-culture co-evolution?", anthropologists Pierre van den Berghe and Peter Frost observed that men in all cultures tend to prefer relatively lighter-skinned females.
Not only that, but human males everywhere are on average darker-skinned than the females of their group. This isn't because the men are out in the sun more, it is because they actually have higher melanin and haemoglobin levels in their skin's outer layers. The sex difference arises at puberty, because girls lighten in colour more than boys do during adolescence, and seems to be genetically determined.
So here we have a cultural universal with a sex-related biological mechanism: which makes it almost certain that, in our evolutionary past before races even existed, there was some selection pressure that favoured lighter-skinned females. Biologist Donald Symons suggests that human males once used skin colour to assess female fecundity. In the environment in which homo sapiens evolved, darker females would have been pre-pubescent, pregnant (90 percent of pregnancies cause a mild, generalised darkening) or menstruating (skin reddens around menstruation).
Frost concludes that "Originally, the social significance of skin colour was derived primarily from the differing complexions of men and women. This older pattern of meaning was lost as a new social environment opened up, especially with the expansion of Europe after the 15th century. Although the older system discriminated between lighter and darker complexions, it did not value one as being superior to the other. This situation changed when skin colour emerged as an ethnic boundary separating a lighter-skinned in-group from a darker-skinned out-group." In other words, history resulted in sex being conflated with race.
It must be emphasized, however, that the mating rituals of homo sapiens are enormously complex, perhaps the most complex thing we do. Complexion is only one factor which influences mate choice, and it is not surprising that a cross-cultural survey by psychologist David Buss found that the qualities men and women value most highly in a potential mate are kindness and understanding. Besides, I know for sure that I, whose criteria for finding women attractive are very genetic-based, have never had light skin on my list of what makes a woman appealing.
Copyright ©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh