Occasionally, I’ll admit, I have trouble hailing taxis. Could that be on account of my caramel-colored epidermis?
No, according to an ad I recently discovered while leafing through a periodical. It featured fleshy, bronzed models decked out in revealing swimwear. The ad, for a tanning salon, urged readers to “Mix it up. Put it on. Get Dark.”
Dark skin, it suggested, is the ticket to a lively, exhilarating, sexy lifestyle. That’s hardly a new idea. Jack Kerouac expressed a similar notion after a nighttime stroll through the “colored section” of Denver in 1949. “I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton,” he recalled, “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”
Kerouac sounded like the whites who frequented uptown New York during the Harlem Renaissance. George S. Schuyler, a black writer, noted them with amusement. The less emancipated ones, he wrote in 1927, “go to the cabarets, where they can sit and watch Negroes dance and caper; the more sensible go to a Negro dance hall, where they can participate in the fray. It is not uncommon to hear them say that the only time they thoroughly enjoy themselves is when they journey to the so-called Black Belt, where joy is not shackled or saddled.”
If you think the idea of blacks cornering the market on exuberance is preposterous, consider its counterpart. Some blacks believe that we live under a curse inflicted on Ham, the biblical figure who laughed at his father’s nakedness. Blacks, the theory goes, are doomed to an endless agony of privation and toil. Schuyler ridiculed that school of thought as well. His satire, “Black No More,” told the story of blacks who sought to become white by taking a potion thought to remove all signs of African ancestry.
Magic potions are still around. Less than 24 hours after seeing the tanning ad, I stumbled onto whiterskin.com, “home of the Natural Skin Whitening Complex.” These kinds of products enjoy surprising popularity among a certain segment of dark-skinned consumers.
Whites wishing they were dark. Blacks wishing they were light.
The strange mixture of loathing and longing with which blacks and whites have long regarded each other has often inspired the imagination of entertainers and artists. You can trace a line from Schuyler to Eddie Murphy’s classic whiteface SNL skit to the Wayans brothers’ film White Chicks. Similarly, Kerouac’s descendants include Norman Mailer’s The White Negro and John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me.
From mass media to cold cream, there’s money to be made from our irresistible obsession with race, which we all know is merely a social construct. Or is it? Most of the time, that makes sense to me. Other times, scientists come along and throw a confusing curve ball.
In the words of Vivian Ota Wang, “You may tell people that race isn’t real and doesn’t matter, but they can’t catch a cab.” Wang works at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Researchers at Penn State University announced that they have discovered the origin of white skin in humans. They told the Washington Post that it likely derives from a mutation in a single individual tens of thousands of years ago.
Keith Cheng, who led the study, cautions against placing too much emphasis on racial difference. “I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who look different.”
To find support for Cheng’s comments, I needed only to scroll down the very web page on which he is quoted. There I found advertiser links to several purveyors of pills, creams and gels, all encouraging readers to mix it up, put it on and get light. The products all promised a newer, paler me, but made no claims about hailing taxis.
A former reporter for the American, Jabari Asim is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is asimj@washpost.com.