> For a long time now I have been convinced that there is truly a global
> passport: one's skin color.
Why is it so? And how does the reported tendency to look "white" square with the infamous "nose jobs"? Or, for that matter, any other form of plastic surgery?
I understand that circulating stories about the universal persecution of one's ethnic group (universal racism, universal anti-semitism, etc.) play an important ideological role in maintaining group cohesion and solidarity or legitimating grievances. However, these are selectively constructed stories that may or may not be representative of human relations in general or worldwide. That is to say, the value of lighter skin color is mainly the US phenomenon and determines the consciousness of most US-eres, even those who oppose this tendency, so they tend to see it everywhere.
However, skin color is not the only marker of social status and prejudice. For example, there is a lot of ethnic prejudice in Africa that is not based on skin color but ethnic lineage or socio-economic status. Thus, Masai who tend to have a lighter shade of skin than other African peoples are nonetheless seen as "inferior" in Kenya, due to their nomadic life style. Many Asians, (e.g. Chinese) tend to consider Europeans as inferior, but the common derisive term for them, I was told, is related not to their skin color, but the shape of their noses (seen as excessively long by the Asian standards). Which brings us to the European anti-Semitism in which too, it is the shape of the nose that "matters." Other bodily "status markers" are abound - ranging from the shape of the foot, to the length of the neck.
Another aspect of the phenomenon is that the "desirability" of a certain physiognomic feature, be it the shape of the nose or the eye, or the shade of the skin has more to do with sexual attractiveness than racism. People tend to be sexually attracted to the exotic, and in many non-white societies looking white is exotic in the same way as "looking Asian or Ethiopian" may be seen as exotic in this country. It occurred to me, for example, that the so called "gothic" look is an attempt to emulate certain "Asian" features. Or take the popularity of tanning among Caucasian women, who do that regardless of risking melanoma. This clearly suggests that darker skin color is attractive because it is exotic.
I also suspect that the preferential treatments that Europeans and US-sers tend to receive in developing countries has more to do with the perceived size of their wallets than the color of their skin. I have been to a number of such countries and it is quite obvious to me that the color that the natives care the most about foreign visitors is not white but green, albeit that started to change as the Euro comes in many different colors. A counterfactual to that is my stay in China during the Cultural Revolution, when the possession of foreign currency by locals could be dangerous. Consequently, being Caucasian did not result in a preferential treatment, au contraire, one was seen as an oddity if not a zoo animal, as evidenced by the attached photo from that period: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/wsokol52/detail?.dir=/e4e5&.dnm=406c.jpg (the nerdy Caucasian kid is my sister).
To summarize, I believe that the salience of the skin color that you report is probably more in the eye of the US-born and raised beholder than in reality of human relations worldwide.
Wojtek
