Tinker:

You mentioned that there is still color prejudice and color preferences among African Americans. In-racial prejudice has long caused a sorts of psycho-social harm to Black people in the USA and elsewhere. This is one "problem of the color line"-to quote the great scholar and activist W.E.B DuBois that was not resolved in the 20th century. I will not go into a discussion of the whys and what fors of this prejudice/preference. However, there are numerous articles and books on the subject online and off-line.

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M.Ted,

I'm not M. Wilson. Nor do I know her. And I'm not interested in defending each of the assertations that M Wilson made in that article of hers whose link I provided and which I quoted at length. My point in providing that link and quoting portions of that article was to provide information and commentary on M. Wilson's major thesis-which I agree with-that blonde haired, blue eyed White women had traditionally been the favored beauty standard for females in the USA and elsewhere.

As to M Wilson's assertation about the color of hair which artists have used to portray the Virgin Mary, that point surptised me as I can only recall seeing the Virgin Mary painted with dark hair. However, I am not an art scholar, not-as I indicated-am I here to critique the separate points that M. Wilson made and to which she provided supportive documentation. [And yes, I'm also aware that choosing "supportive documentation" is often done to match one's prior beliefs].

Be that as it may, there are a large number of online and off line articles and books that a person may read which address the issues of color preference and color prejudice. Persons interested in this subject have a huge number of resources that they can access.

One book which I found fascinating is Frank M. Snowden, Jr - "Before Color Prejudice; The Ancient View of Blacks"

The author of that book, Frank M. Snowden Jr. is a Professor Emeritus of Classics at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and one of the foremost scholars on blacks in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Italy. Among Professor Snowden Jr's awards is the National Humanities Medal [2004]. For what it's worth, Professor Snowden, Jr. happens to be a very light skinned Black man.

I'm going to take the liberty of posting to this thread the entire review of this book from http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/2007/06/frank-m-snowden-jr-before-color.html Resolute Reader-One man's odyssey through the world of books; Friday, June 22, 2007


"Those who argue that racism can be overcome, or ended are often confronted with the argument that racism or prejudice has always existed. Many, particularly from the Marxist tradition have argued however that racism is a more recent invention - that there have been societies in the past (and indeed today) were racism was unheard off.

For this reason, Frank Snowden's book is a fascinating read. He examines Ancient images and portrayals of the black people's of Africa in writings, sculpture and painting. His conclusions are stark, but simple. Racism, as a systematic system of prejudice and oppression or as a set of ideas that assigned stereotypes to a group of people based on their skin colour.

Of course there may have been prejudices, but Snowden finds surprisingly few examples. Indeed, rather the opposite, he argues that for one society, that of Ancient Egypt, skin colour was rarely mentioned when describing someone from the regions to the south of Egypt. The "Nubian" peoples, where instead venerated as excellent warriors, often used in Egypt's armies as mercenaries. Similarly in Roman and Greek writings, were skin colour was mentioned, it was almost always in a descriptive, rather than derogatory way.

Neither the Greeks, Romans or Egyptians had any systematic negative views of black people. Snowden describes contemporary descriptions of the Roman children expressing initial surprise and fear upon seeing a black person for the first time, but also compares this to modern research into childhood responses to someone of a different skin colour. Research that shows that such childlike response rarely leads to racist views in adult life.

If there is a flaw in the book, it's that it doesn't really shed much light on why racism is so prevalent in modern society. One argument that Snowden gives is that the ancient people's lived side by side with black people, thus there was no shock of discovery as white and black people met for the first time.

I think this is a weak explanation. There certainly were a few black and Asian people who travelled to the western lands in more recent times, and certainly (as Snowden acknowledges) the bible refers to black men and women so Christian countries would have not been living in ignorance of non-white peoples. This knowledge and fleeting encounters did not lead to racism in the way we know it.

I think that it is important to say that modern racism as had a concrete starting point. This is the invention of racial explanations, by the white establishment to explain the slave trade. The brutalities of slavery could only be justified through some sort of racial demonisation and this needed to be invented.

This perhaps is the missing chapter of Frank Snowden's book, though in itself the book is a clear (and beautifully illustrated) explanation of the lack of racism in the ancient past. It's worth quoting the author's conclusions at length, as his work, I believe has had to small a readership:

'...in the ancient world there were prolonged black-white contacts, from an early date; first encounters with blacks frequently involved soldiers or mercenaries, not slaves or so-called savages; initial favourable impressions of black were explained and amplified, generation after generation, by poets, historian and philosophers; the central societies developed a positive image in of peripheral Nubia as an independent stae of considerable military, political and cultural importance; both blacks and whites were slaves, but blacks and slaves were never synonymous; black emigres were noT excluded from opportunities available to others of alien extraction, nor were they handicapped in fundamental social relations - they were physically and culturally assimilated; in science, philosophy and religion color was not the basis of a widely accepted theory concerning the inferiority of blacks.' "