Читать книгу Original Skin - Maryrose Cuskelly - Страница 8
ОглавлениеMelting Pot: the colour of skin
‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’
—Martin Luther King, 1963
WHEN THE 2000 SYDNEY OLYMPIC GAMES were on, our family watched a lot of the swimming competition on TV My eldest son, who was about three years old at the time, was fascinated with the obvious physical differences between the swimmers, and would often ask of any swimmer who wasn’t white, ‘Where are they from?’
By the time the finals of the various swimming events were reached, almost all the non-Caucasian swimmers were Japanese, and we answered accordingly. Somehow, over the weeks that we watched the Olympics, my son came to assume that anyone who looked racially different from himself was, by default, Japanese.
‘Is he Japanese?’ he’d ask in his clear, chiming voice, pointing at the tall, young man with ebony skin and black curly hair busily packing supermarket shelves as we wheeled our trolley past. ‘Is she Japanese?’ again with extended index finger and bell-like tone as a sari-clad woman with honey-coloured skin climbed aboard the tram.
I tried to explain to him that these people, in all likelihood, were Australian. That just because someone had dark skin didn’t mean they were foreign; that the original inhabitants of this continent were all black or brown.
‘Remember how we watched Cathy Freeman light the flame at the opening of the Olympic Games?’ I asked him. ‘She’s brown and she’s Australian.’ I explained that our family looked the way we did because our ancestors came from Ireland. ‘Australians come in all colours,’ I said, appalled that somehow this wasn’t obvious to him. After all, we Melburnians pride ourselves on living in one of the most multicultural cities in the world. There were black kids and Asian kids at his childcare centre. How was it that being white had, for him, even at his tender age, become intrinsic to being Australian?
I counted it as a small victory when one day, not long after this conversation, as we were walking around our neighbourhood, we came across a man delivering advertising brochures.
‘Look, Mum,’ my son said loudly, pointing at him as we passed, ‘He’s brown and he’s Australian.’
WHEN WE REFER to ourselves and others as being ‘black’ or ‘white’, we are rarely talking about just the colour of our skin. Blackness and whiteness each have their own set of inherent meanings to do with history, culture, and politics that go beyond the amount of melanin in a particular individual’s skin.
Despite the fact that the majority of the world’s population come in varying degrees of brown, it is the binary alternatives of black and white, and their attached symbolism, that is forced upon us. Traditionally, black has been associated with sin and defilement, white with goodness and purity.
As a child brought up within the Roman Catholic faith, I knew that the innermost part of my being, my soul, was, of course, white. Visible only to God, it hovered inside the borders of my body, a perfect simulacrum, albeit a pale, insubstantial one. Sins, I was told, would appear like black stains on that pristine whiteness if I strayed from the path defined as right and good by the Church. Limbo was still a tenet of the Catholic faith then, and for my peers and me it was filled with little black babies—the progeny of the pagan hordes who lived in the dark continent of Africa. Having died before they could be baptised, these babies could never be admitted to heaven but were to linger forever in the in-between place of Limbo.
In my heart of hearts, I envied them. We were told by the nuns who gave us religious instruction that Limbo was exactly like heaven, except that those in Limbo were denied seeing the face of God. That would have been a blessed relief as far as I was concerned. The idea of God’s huge, bearded head looming perpetually out of the clouds was alarming to my five-year-old self to say the least.
Even recalling that image now, planted so vividly in my imagination as I sat in the cold room beneath the nave receiving religious instruction, makes me nervous about the idea of heaven. Oh, to be a little black baby, babbling happily in the benign environment of Limbo, blissfully ignorant of the existence of God.
AS I BOARD a bus in Strasbourg, France, my eyes are drawn to an extraordinary looking woman who has already taken her seat. Her skin is exceptionally pale, and her thick, wiry hair, arrayed in an intricate pattern of plaited rows, is a yellowy-cream. When she removes her sunglasses, for a moment, I see that long, milky eyelashes frame her whey-coloured eyes in a remarkable frill. Despite the translucence of her skin and corn-silk coloured hair, her features are unmistakeably African.
The disjunction of her complexion and her features draws my gaze. I fight the urge to stare, but my eyes are drawn again and again to that impossibly white skin and improbably coloured hair. The woman has an otherworldly beauty that sets her apart whether I look at her or not. The effect of her appearance is so dramatic that I immediately associate it with the images once so popular with Benetton, the clothing manufacturer, and its iridescent advertising campaigns featuring gorgeous models with every possible variation of skin and hair colour. I realise of course that, far from being a prop for a hip, multiracial, we-are-the-world clothing manufacturer, my fellow passenger has albinism.
In The Book of Enoch, a work regarded as non-canonical by the vast majority of Christian churches and not included either in the Jewish scriptures or the Christian Old Testament, the story is told of the birth of Noah. There is a fairytale quality to the account, with the baby described as having a body as ‘white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful’. The birth of the child sent his father, Lamech, into a spin. He assumed from the baby’s appearance that the child was an angel. More modern interpretations of the text take a less whimsical approach, assuming the baby’s ‘whiteness’ is an indication that Noah had albinism.
The Reverend William Archibald Spooner, famous (perhaps apocryphally) for proposing a toast to our ‘queer old dean’ rather than to the royal lady intended (among other malapropisms), also had the condition.
Albinism is a hereditary condition affecting about one in 17,000 people that results from a lack, or a decreased amount, of tyrosinase, an enzyme necessary for the production of the pigment melanin. This lack of pigment means that people born with the condition may have white or very light hair, pale eyes, and very pale skin. While the popular image of someone with albinism is as red-eyed, most have blue eyes—although eye colour in those with albinism can range from pinkish through to violet, and even to hazel or brown. Apart from the effect on the production of pigment, the other main impact is on the opticfibre pathways, and people with albinism often have poor vision.
In the past, albinism was considered freakish enough for P. T. Barnum to include a family with the condition in his American Museum and in his travelling sideshow, along with bearded ladies and conjoined twins. Folklore and myth regarding albinism include the beliefs that individuals with it can conduct electricity, read minds, and see in the dark.
Less benign misconceptions are that those with albinism are of below-average intelligence and are sterile. In the Dutch language, kakerlak, which also means cockroach, is the word for someone with albinism. More poetically, in some Native American cultures, they are called ‘Children of the Moon’, because of their aversion to strong sunlight.
During the rise of Nazism in Germany, those with albinism were maligned as ‘effeminate’, and so were despised. More recently, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code drew on the popularly negative connotations of those with the condition in his portrayal of Silas, the murderous albino monk.
IN A CITY LIKE MELBOURNE, where people have come from across the hemisphere and from every continent, the range of skin colours among us is nothing short of remarkable. As the lunchtime crowds swarm across the streets, a cross-section of the races of man and the medleys of skin colour form a mosaic: from the blue-blackness of someone who hails from the horn of Africa to the pale-skinned, yellow-haired individual whose forbears were Vikings, and all the shades in between. You would need to plunder a paint catalogue to find names to accurately define the variations in tone, despite the fact that, of our 30,000-odd chromosomes, only two of them carry the handful of genes that determine our skin colour. Yet, somehow, the colour of a person’s skin, for many of us, brings with it a whole range of associations that have no basis in fact but merely provide convenient shorthand to compartmentalise difference.
Despite all the permutations of skin colour represented in my city, I find my eyes are still drawn irresistibly to those whose skin tone varies dramatically from my own. There is something about that difference that catalyses my interest, my fascination. Or is it simply my innate racism? Difference excites us all at some level, I suppose—a difference in gender, in status, in sexual orientation. But I am disappointed in my own shallowness—that such a superficial difference as skin colour attracts my gaze so unerringly.
Whiteness is my default position: the times I have spent in countries where my particular shade of pale is not the norm have been brief—and cocooned in the protective swathe of tourist dollars.
Not that I think I’m alone. Photographers and clothes stylists appear to dote on the contrast of white and black: think of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of nude men, their sculptured bodies appearing like negatives of each other, studies in sameness and difference. His now alinost-iconic images continue to exert a strong aesthetic influence, evidenced in fashion spreads in glossy magazines that often feature a Scandinavian-looking beauty in the arms of a coal-black Adonis.
WHEN TRAVELLING IN VIETNAM, I became aware that pale skin is deemed attractive there—especially by young women. In that hot, humid climate, they take great care to cover up their skin to protect it from the darkening effects of the sun. The ubiquitous motorbike is the most popular form of transport, and apart from the sheer number of these machines, and the fact that whole families seem to travel on them, the most notable thing is the way that the young women who ride on them are dressed. Adopting gangster-chic, they pull on long gloves that reach almost to their shoulders; their hats are worn low over their faces, and kerchiefs are tied outlaw-style below their eyes. Our guide in Ho Chi Minh City, a vivacious young woman called Anh, joked that she didn’t have a boyfriend because she was ‘too brown’.
As well as being a guide for tourists, Anh worked in a local orphanage. She was slightly bemused by the apparent preference that childless Western couples, coming to Vietnam in the hope of adopting a baby, exhibited towards the darker-skinned Khmer babies at the orphanage. She and the other orphanage staff would try to draw the attention of the prospective adoptive parents to the fairer-skinned babies, whom the locals considered more beautiful.
Like the young women I saw in Vietnam, my grandmother’s generation would barely venture outside without gloves and extravagantly large hats to protect their skin from the sun. Freckles and tanning were blemishes to be blanched with buttermilk, if you were careless enough to expose your skin to the sun’s damaging beams.
When I was a teenager, we offered ourselves up to the same sun with a sensual slavishness that would have appalled my grandmother and her sisters. My friends and I envied those girls with naturally olive skin: our firm belief was that tans made us look thinner and added to our attractiveness just as surely as a perky bosom. Sunburn, blisters, and skin that peeled off like sheets of dried glue didn’t deter us from achieving our aim of the perfect tan. We’d sit in a row in the sunniest position during our school lunchbreak, the skirts of our uniforms hitched high, socks pulled low, to get the nut-brown legs we desired.
Now, of course, we know the dangers of melanoma and skin cancer and, while some of us heed the warnings and cover up in the sun, rates of skin cancer are still very high in Australia. Some opt for spray-on tans, bending over in G-strings to submit themselves to the mist of oil and pigment that will give them that all-over burnish even in their crevasses and creases, no matter if the sun’s rays would shine there naturally.
IN EUROPEAN CULTURE, the idea of the dusky maiden and the delights that she might offer to a white-skinned paramour was enhanced by tales brought back by sailors on voyages to the Pacific, such as those undertaken by Captain Cook. The perceived promiscuity and lasciviousness of the black woman was the source of many a fantasy for European man.
This idea appears still to have currency, according to an article in the New Yorker by Zadie Smith, a British novelist with an English father and a Jamaican mother. Smith wrote, ‘If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin.’ Not just any Paul Gauguin, of course, but one from his Tahitian period when he was painting brown-skinned women with frangipanis behind their ears, seminude, and reclining on beaches or holding large fruits. It might be in the form of a valentine card, Smith says, or wrapping paper, but it will come. Smith went on to describe a holiday with her lover where she completely destroyed his fantasy of being on a tropical island with his very own brown girl. Rather than the sarong-swathed nymph of his imagination, Smith turned into a swollen, whining wet blanket when she found herself to be allergic to ‘the whole country’ of Tonga.
Perhaps it is a case of the grass always being greener; in some Melanesian cultures, it is women with fairer skin who are favoured by men. They are deemed to be more sexually receptive than their darker-skinned counterparts, and therefore more desirable.
AS PEOPLE AND POPULATIONS become more mobile, it becomes less and less possible to guess someone’s nationality by the colour of their skin. How you sound is more reliable in determining your nationality than what you look like. Skin tone may hold a clue to your ancestors’ birthplace, but open your mouth and the sounds that issue forth will place you unerringly where you were bred if not born.
An article published in the Scotsman newspaper in early 2004 quoted a Scottish national survey that found that the majority of Scots were more likely to accept someone with dark skin and a Scottish accent as being Scottish than they were of accepting someone from England who had settled permanently in Scotland as being Scottish. The oldest enmities obviously die hardest.
From the earliest times, differing skin colour has been viewed as a problem with no obvious solution. When Europeans first began encountering those with darker-hued skin than their own, various theories were put forward to account for humans coming in different colours. Of equal interest to them was what could be inferred about a person from the darkness or paleness of their skin. Of course, there was a vested interest in defining non-Europeans as lesser beings than Europeans. Predictably racist theories, taking the view that the darker-skinned races were less evolved than the white man, gained support and extended to the hypothesis that those races were a different (and inferior) species altogether.
With the Enlightenment and the elevation of science that it brought, these views of the races, and their inherent differences, were supported by ‘scientific’ theories and evidence that persisted into the 20th century. In 1927, in his pamphlet titled ‘The Characters of the Human Skin in Their Relations to Questions of Race and Health’, H. J. Fleure, a professor of geography and anthropology at the University College of Wales, acknowledged the common ancestry of the world’s peoples, but took great pains to explain the different characteristics of the races. His view was that it was the superiority of the European environment that accounted for the more ‘agile brain of the European’. By contrast, the ‘specialization of both Mongolian and Negro’ skin, limiting ‘the multiplication of sensory endings’, allowed for their survival in the sweltering climate of the tropics and was responsible for their ‘lesser general irritability’ and ‘greater equanimity of temperament’.
Because Europeans lacked these adaptations of the skin, Fleure lectured on the unsuitability of tropical climates for the European. He suggested the compromise of a ‘sheltered life’ for those daring or foolhardy enough to venture to the ‘torrid’ regions and encouraged the ‘employment of coloured native field-labour’. Naturally, he warned, the ‘social dangers’ of such an arrangement should not be underestimated.
How could any reasonable person possibly take offence at these carefully constructed arguments? Such a flurry of pseudoscientific claims dressed up in ‘rational’ language carefully avoids any blatantly crude racist rhetoric. Dispiritingly, equally racist views are expressed in less rational terms on the websites of White Pride and similar organisations today.
THE REASONS for different races exhibiting different skin tones is still of interest to scientists and anthropologists. They seek to understand why such variation has developed between various populations in different latitudes of the globe. With poignant and yet naive simplicity, some even preface or append their theories with the hope that, by reducing skin colour to a response to environmental conditions, racism will somehow become a thing of the past.
The colour of human skin is mainly determined by the amount and size of the melanin molecules found within it. Layers of fat and the presence of blood vessels also play a part. Melanin is a pigment produced by cells called melanocytes, which are present in the inner layers of the epidermis. Sunlight stimulates the production of melanin, which is why skin tans when it is exposed to the sun.
Scientists, anthropologists, and casual observers alike have noted that, historically, darker-skinned peoples were found in latitudes close to the equator. An obvious and convenient explanation was that humans living in these latitudes developed dark skin as a protective device against skin cancer and melanoma, both of which may be caused by exposure to ultraviolet, or UV, light found in greater quantities in equatorial regions. While this theory has its merits, as melanin does act as a sunscreen, on its own it doesn’t account for those dark-skinned populations who went north gradually losing colour. If the likelihood of developing skin cancer were the only factor in determining concentrations of melanin in a population, it wouldn’t necessarily be detrimental to have darker skin in an area with lower levels of UV radiation. Other factors must have been at play.
Recent research into the colour of human skin begins with the assumption that our earliest common ancestors’ skin was fair. This assumption is partly based on the fact that our nearest relatives in terms of species, chimpanzees, have light skin. At birth, young chimps have pink skin on their faces, the palms of their hands, and the soles of their feet. As they age, their skin freckles and darkens due to exposure to the sun.
It is widely believed that as our ancestors moved out of the jungles and onto the sun-exposed savannah and began walking and running long distances, the issue of over-heating became more pressing. Gradually, as these creatures evolved to become modern-day humans, they became less hairy, with an increased number of sweat glands to allow them to more easily regulate their body temperature in that harsher climate. Long, thick hair remained on their heads as protection against their brains overheating. However, with the loss of body hair, their skins were much more exposed to the sun and the risks that it brings.
This leads neatly to the theory that our earliest light-skinned ancestors gradually evolved to have dark skin as a protection against sun cancer.
For American anthropologist Nina Jablonski and her husband, George Chaplin, a geographic information-systems specialist, the sun—cancer theory didn’t go far enough in explaining variations in skin colour. Jablonski believed that, as most sun cancers occur in people after their childbearing years, the impact on reproductive success, and therefore on evolution, would be minor. This point was crucial in her search to find other factors that would explain the prevalence of dark-skinned populations closer to the equator and fairer-skinned populations in the north.
Since the 1960s, scientists have known that UV light converts cholesterol in the skin into vitamin D. They have also known that melanin inhibits vitamin D production in the skin, and so that lighter skin allows for greater absorption of UV light for vitamin D conversion than darker skin does. Vitamin D is essential for the absorption of calcium, which, as practically every Australian school child could tell you, is essential for strong, healthy bones and teeth. People with calcium deficiency run the risk of developing diseases such as rickets and osteoporosis. Rickets mainly affects the young, as their skeletons are developing, resulting in soft or deformed bones. Osteoporosis, a risk in later years, results in brittle bones.
While vitamin D is available from some foods, including fish oil, most of us get the bulk of our requirements indirectly from sunlight, which carries UV light to our skin. Although rickets is relatively rare in Australia, in 2001, the Medical Journal of Australia identified a new high-risk group for vitamin D deficiency: dark-skinned women and women who wear traditional Islamic dress.
These women, because of the role that melanin plays in inhibiting vitamin D production in the skin, and because most clothing absorbs ultraviolet B radiation (necessary for producing vitamin D), are susceptible to this deficiency, and so, too, are their children.
Jablonski was able, through access to a NASA database of measurements of UV radiation at the earth’s surface, to establish that the middle latitudes do in fact get more UV light. Here, where historically people have dark skin, there is sufficient UV to synthesise vitamin D all year round. In subtropical and temperate regions, where people with lighter skin but with the ability to tan are historically found, all but one month of the year provided enough sunlight to synthesise vitamin D; and in the third region, near the poles, on average, there is insufficient UV radiation to produce vitamin D in the skin.
From another study, Jablonksi came across a crucial link between successful reproduction and skin colour. This study showed that folate, a substance necessary to prevent neural-tube defects like spina bifida occurring in developing foetuses, is depleted in the human body when it is exposed to sunlight. Folate is also vital for the production of viable sperm. The lighter skinned a person is, the more rapidly folate breaks down within the body.
With this study, Jablonksi had found a link between factors for successful breeding and exposure to the sun. On the exposed plains of the savannah, darker skin would have meant more success at breeding, and so natural selection would have favoured those more swarthy individuals. Jablonski’s hypothesis was further strengthened when she came across a paper written by an Argentinean paediatrician who attended the birth of three babies with neural-tube defects whose mothers had all used solariums in the early stages of their pregnancies.
Because of the large amounts of sunlight available all through the year in those central latitudes around the equator, dark-skinned people living in these regions, despite the large amounts of melanin in their skin, were able to absorb enough sunlight for their vitamin D needs, while protecting themselves from folate depletion, sunburn, and skin cancer.
As populations slowly migrated north, the dark-skinned ancestors of what are now the fair-skinned northern Europeans found themselves at risk of developing vitamin D deficiency during the long, dark winters. Not only did they have to cover up more of their skin in order to keep warm, there were also less hours of sunshine in which to absorb UV rays to do the vitamin D conversion. Those with less melanin, and so able to convert more vitamin D, would have had greater reproductive success in the northern climes than those with darker skin. As a result, these populations would have gradually evolved to have lighter coloured skin.
Of course, for every theory there are exceptions, and in this case it is the Inuit people of the Arctic regions and Tibetans. Brown of skin and yet living up near the North Pole—where in mid-winter the sun barely rises above the horizon—how do the Inuit fit into Jablonksi’s theory? In evolutionary terms, the Inuit have only been living in the Arctic regions for a relatively short time: 6000 to 10,000 years. They also traditionally have a diet that is rich in vitamin D and calcium—all that fish and seal blubber. So give them another few thousand years and the Inuit will probably be much lighter skinned than they are now
As for the Tibetans, their skin is lighter than would be predicted by Jablonski’s theory. However, they, too, like the Inuit, have lived in their current location for less than 10,000 years and, because of low temperatures experienced on the Tibetan Plateau, they need to wear sufficient clothing to survive. Their lighter skin allows them to absorb more UV light for vitamin D conversion than if their skin was dark.
The process of tanning is one way that humans cope with the competing benefits and risks of exposure to the sun. In summer, darker, tanned skin provides some protection against sunburn and folate depletion; then, in winter, the tan fades to allow for more absorption of sunshine for vitamin D conversion.
So it would appear that the evolution of the different colour of human skin is the result of a complex balancing act to allow for the absorption of UV to produce vitamin D, the maintenance of sufficient amounts of folate to ensure viable sperm and prevent neural-tube defects, and the protection of the skin against cancers. Across all populations, men tend to have darker skin than women of the same racial groups. Jablonski ascribes this to the increased need women have for vitamin D when pregnant and breastfeeding.
But just when you think the whole skin colour thing has been sewn up, along comes another theory. In 2001, an Australian biologist, James Mackintosh, showed in his PhD that melanin acts as an antimicrobial agent in insects. Melanin is quite a ‘sticky’ molecule, to the extent that it can clog up micro-organisms so that they find it difficult to proliferate. Mackintosh went on to suggest that this may be why, in humans, individuals with dark skin are less likely to suffer from serious skin diseases.
During the Vietnam War, when American soldiers were slogging through the hot, humid region of the Mekong Delta, white-skinned soldiers were three times more likely to develop tropical ulcers than their black-skinned comrades. So the enhanced capacity of black skin to protect against disease might be an additional reason why people in the tropics developed the capacity to produce more melanin. This might also help to explain why large amounts of melanin are found in areas such as the throat, the nasal passages, and the genitals—areas of the body that are rarely exposed to sunlight. So, rather than correlating with latitude or exposure to the sun, dark skin may be linked to temperature and humidity. But what about those theory-bending Inuit? They still seem to be the exception.
Putting all this information together, the colour of our skin probably results from a combination of various evolutionary responses to sunlight, vitamin D, folate, and the antimicrobial properties of melanin. Skin colour has nothing to do with intelligence, integrity, or temperament, but is determined by a handful of genes. So can racism (based on skin colour, at least) finally be relegated to the past as a shameful and erroneous belief that we, as a species, have finally grown out of? Perhaps eventually it will be taken out of our hands altogether. In 2006, The Age newspaper reported on the predictions of Dr Oliver Curry of the Darwin@LSE research centre at the London School of Economics, who said that by the year 3006, most humans, due to our increasing interconnectedness, will have a similar brown skin tone.
