My wife is Thai but is one-quarter ethnic Chinese. She has very fair skin which is considered highly desirable in her country and is often complimented for having this physical attribute. Whereas we have tanning salons they have "whitening" salons and clinics. Women's magazines are chock full of ads for products and articles on how to lighten one's skin. People in the cities go out of their way to walk in the shade of buildings or carry umbrellas. It is quite common to see laborers whose jobs require them to work outside completely covered from head to toe with only their eyes showing even though the temperature and humidity are excessively high. Thais, when they go to the beach, typically do not wear swimming attire, but rather are fully clothed. Darker skinned people are routinely discriminated against and are generally viewed as lower class. Foreigners, whether tourists or residents, whose ethnic origins are from South Asia, Africa ,or the Middle East are despised, riduculed, and viewed suspiciously, whereas the ones from China, Korea, Japan, or Europe are admired, aspired to, and held in great esteem. In fact Thais categorize people not by their country of origin as we would, but rather by their ethnicity. For example all whites are referred to as "farang" and all blacks as "negro" (although when they pronounce the word it sounds more like nee-ko). Arabs, South Asians, Mediterranean Europeans, some other Southeast Asians, and even Thai Muslims, get broadly lumped together in a category referred to as "ka-ek". When my wife first came here to the U.S. she was somewhat at a loss as to which category Hispanics belonged to as their physical attributes didn't easily fit any of her predetermined views.

IMO, and from what I can discern, it's more often not the ethnic groups themselves who avoid publicizing this preference for lighter skin, it's the PC crowd who who tries to cover up and deny that racists come in any color other than white.

I believe after the Haitian revolution/bloodbath 200-odd years ago, the Haitians themselves set up a race heirarchy based on how black you were -- measured in 1/128ths (i.e. all ancestors for seven generations; even the Nazis didn't break down race beyond four generations/ 1/16ths).

The only difference from the 1/128ths black heirarchy during the French Colonial slave days was that now the higher fractional-black outranked fractional-white (57/128ths blacks got to stomp on 56/128ths blacks who in return had to bow before Their Betters), while under slavery fractional-whites outranked fractional-blacks.

Predictable, even inevitable. Once you create a property in racial identity, as done by the Nazis and the proponents of affirmative action, you, perforce, create a need for racial classification. If you want to make sure that you have enough Aryans in the University of Heidelburg, you have to start measuring skulls and sniffing armpits.

Michael Jackson

Richard Pryor told a story about going 'back to Africa', to 'reconnect with his roots'.

So he goes out to a rural area, to get the real African experience. It occurs to him that his ancestors weren't likely from quite this area and stops a local man to ask a question.

"Excuse me," he said, "but could you tell me what tribe I seem to be from?"

The local looked at him carefully and considered before hazarding a guess.

"Italian?"

A friend of mine is a Filipina with, to me, beautiful skin the color of honey.

She is quite a bit darker than her sisters, and was discriminated within her own family for it, brutally.

As a "white" American with African and Native ancestry on both sides of my famly, it's been very interesting for me to follow the debate over "race consciousness" and issues like intra-racial disoutes over color preference.

As Lou notes above, it is sad but inevitable when you place a quantitative or qualitative value on "race". It's been fascinating to me to look back into my family history and see the consequences of the societal valuation of race. My "very mixed" great-grandmother always wore a hat outdoors, not just for protective value, but to stay pale--unlike her very dark father whose long hours on horseback as a rural doctor had left him much darker than, say, Lenny Kravitz.

Another oddity--my "mixed" ancestors--all pro-Confederate; my whites--almost totally pro-Union. My theory is that my "mixed" ancestors saw embracing the Confederate cause as a quick and certain way to associate and engratiate themselves with the white majority community in their area.

As for myself, the older I get the more I perceive myself as being of only one "race"--the American "race". Whether we consciously realize it or not, that is what we have been building for 300 years now, a new group of people culled from every continent and ethnicity on this earth.

she demanded people expand their idea of Latin beauty beyond the light-complexioned examples of Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek.

Demanding that people change their ideas of beauty, as if it was an item in a contract negotiation, strikes me as very funny.

Yeah. My father, half 'Bama redneck, half Louisiana Creole by ancestry, used to tell us that he looked forward to the time when "Americans would be a tea-colored people."

Out here in Hawaii, we already are.