Expert: John Shea - 4/18/2008

Question
QUESTION: I had a question, did european coloanism foster the notion of white supremacy. After my history class I was thinking about how european standards of beauty effects almost EVERY country. In Africa, America, Asia etc. It seems that in every country european culture has been injected into some form. I have noticed that some east indians have massive inferiority complexes about dark skin, and how white skin and european features are better then there own. I am a black american teenage male and I have really dark skin and strong african features, but my parents have ligh yellow skin and european hair and facial features. My dad has blue eyes. My parents said I inherited genes from my immigrant sudanese great grandparents . I have been teased for the way I look across the board in my life by other blacks. " Saying thing like how can your parents create such a dark child" It seems like alot of black people have this unconcious self hatred of anything that looks Black African. It seems embedded everywhere. Does it stem from slavery and mistreatment. A white standard of beauty caste system is also in place in south America and the carribean. All this is created by european coloanism?

ANSWER: Dear Jason
The notion that one's own group (people who share the similar genes, language, and culture) are superior to others is a human cultural universal.
The idea that humans can be ranked hierarchically across-the-board on the basis of some superficial physical characteristic, like skin color, on the other hand, is a relatively recent phenomenon.  It emerged in Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries, by which point Europeans had been colonizing other continents for 400 years or more.  If you look into it, this skin-color ranking really emerged not from the experience of the people actually doing the colonizing, but rather from "armchair" anthropologists whose knowledge about these colonized Africans, Asians, and Americans was filtered by stories of travelers, merchants, military, and missionaries.  It was also developed to provide a veneer of scientific credibility to the institution of chattel slavery.  Needless to say, the scientific bases for these conclusions did not withstand close scrutiny after the Darwinian revolution in biology.
This being said, the powerless often imitate the attitudes of powerful, and it is the case (as you assert) that some Asians and Africans assign value to skin color.  I think, though, you will find this is mostly something that takes place among people who were brutally subjugated in their own countries and/or among people who were transported (as were the ancestors of African-Americans, and peoples of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean, and South and Central America).
The subject of skin color often comes up where I work in East Africa.  White people are not a common sight in rural parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Kenya.  In the parts of those countries where European Colonial influence has been slight, people think blue-eyed pale-skinned people like me are either hilarious or scary-looking, but they do not rank one another in terms of skin color.  If they rank us with respect to them, it is probably because we spend the whole day wandering around in the sun looking for little bones and stone tools, rather than tending our crops and flocks like any sane person.  (That we look odd, is just icing on the cake.)  Africa being the center of human genetic diversity, people of any given group there have as much variation in skin color in their own group as they usually have between them and any of their neighbors.  Not surprisingly, skin-color based hierarchies are rare.
In cases where such skin-color-based rankings do occur (e.g., Rwanda, South Africa) they can be traced directly to European colonialists playing one ethnic group off against the other and to these groups looking for physical clues to their different cultural identities (e.g., Hutu and Tutsi).
So, bottom line, I think you are right that the ranking associated with skin color is an artifact of European Colonialism. There is no record of it prior to 1500 AD, when European colonialims began in earnest.  It is  important to keep in mind, that this or any hierarchical ranking of humans has no basis in any scientific research.  Not too long ago on a geologial timescale, all of our ancestors were probably squatting around the same campfire in East Africa.  They would probably have found the idea of ranking people based on skin color just as hilarious as we now find the idea odious.
There is a recent book about the evolution of variation in human skin color by Nina Jablonski that may be of interest to you.
Sincerely
John Shea



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QUESTION: Thanks for the reference, I don't know if you can answer the question but how was one so called ethnic group able to colonize 80% of the globe, inject their culture and impose their standard of beauty. Why not anyone else?

Answer
Dear Jason
The question of why Europeans did so well in colonization is discussed very clearly in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.  This is a popular book and it should be easy enough to find in any library.  I could not possibly do justice to the book in a short response, but in a nutshell, Europeans' success has to do with geographic circumstances.
Cheers
John Shea