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This chapter examines how the “yellow race” became an important focus in nineteenth-century anthropology. More specifically, it considers how the whole notion of skin tone had become inextricably linked to scientifically validated prejudices and normative claims about higher and lower forms of human culture. The chapter first discusses why the term “Mongolian” was selected to represent the people of the Far East and compares it to “Tartar” before exploring how the new field of anthropology became preoccupied with the idea of anatomical quantification, and especially the measurement of skin color using an instrument known as the color top. It shows that the desire to find yellowness in East Asians was so ingrained in the Western imagination that some anthropologists tried to prove that their skin really was yellow.

This chapter reviews evidence supporting the hypothesis that color vision is a kind of social vision, about the emotional states and moods of others. The argument from the first of the three main sections of the chapter centers on evidence that our perception of skin is organized so that we are maximally able to discriminate spectral changes around baseline skin color, akin to the way in which we are maximally able to discriminate temperature changes of skin around baseline skin temperature. The argument from the second section concerns evidence that our primate cone sensitivities have been designed by natural selection to sense the subtle spectrum changes that occur with modulations of hemoglobin oxygenation. Finally, the third section presents evidence that it is the primates with color vision that are bare-skinned; the nontrichromatic primates are furry faced, like a typical mammal. This is just as the hypothesis would predict if color vision is about skin.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of new sorts of human taxonomies as well as new claims about the color of all human groups, including East Asians, during the course of the eighteenth century, as well as their racial implications. It first considers the theory advanced in 1684 by the French physician and traveler François Bernier, who proposed a “new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of man which inhabit it.” One of these races, he suggested, was yellow. Then in 1735, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema naturae, in which he categorized homo sapiens into four different skin colors. Finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, also a physician and the founder of comparative anatomy, declared that the people of the Far East were a yellow race, as distinct from the white “Caucasian” one.

This chapter presents empirical analyses of inequalities of opportunity for social mobility in Brazil. It conducts three types of analyses. First, it describes the intergenerational mobility between the parents' class or class of origin and the class of destination of whites, pardos, and blacks. The intent here is to verify what has a greater influence on the inequality of opportunities for ascensional mobility: the class of origin or skin color. Next, it provides a decomposition of such mobility, taking as an intermediary point the educational level achieved. Education is one of the most important factors of social ascension: without educational qualifications, one cannot, for instance, occupy professional positions, and thereby obtain relatively more comfortable life conditions. The inequality of educational opportunities is analyzed to verify the weight of class origin and skin color upon the chances of completing different educational levels. Finally, the chapter analyzes the likelihood that mobility opportunities will favor the more privileged classes, according to an individual's educational level, class origin, and skin color. This three-stage analysis enables the disclosure of the main barriers to social mobility, and also an evaluation of the combination of race and class of origin that inhibit such mobility.

This chapter augments the cultural grid. Three “legacies” or tracts of dominant cultural conventions of the post-Reconstruction era were intersected by the author. These concern the constructions of gender among black women during the antebellum. These include the interrelationships among skin color, gentility, and social mobility as will be discussed. Among others, this chapter tackles the gender constructions of the black female during the antebellum. Gentility, color, and social mobility of black women are also described. The pedagogy of sentimental literature is expounded. Lastly, this chapter looks at the male and female generic narratives of racial protest. The generic differences between the narratives of the late nineteenth century which dealt with racial protest are also tackled.

I examine the racial experiences that four Intralatino/as have had visiting their respective home countries, as well as within their own social circles in Chicago, in being excluded and Othered in terms of their skin color and their multiple, hybrid national identities. These experiences with race and skin color—both dark and light skin colors—are informed by the dominant racial national imaginaries of countries such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, Colombia and Ecuador. While highlighting the relational and situational nature of the social meanings accorded to skin color, these four anecdotes of racial belonging and non-belonging also problematize and complicate our understanding of race and social identities in the United States.

This chapter examines skin whitening practices within a transnational context as well as their political and racial meanings. Drawing on in-depth interviews with forty-six Indonesian women, it asks why women use whitening creams and how they make sense of skin-whitening practices. Using the concept of malu (Indonesian word for shyness, embarrassment, shame, or restraint and propriety), it argues that women's decision to use skin-whitening products is driven by the so-called “gendered management of affect.” It discusses the gendered ways in which emotions and affects are managed and links beauty practices such as whitening one's skin to the gendered management of affects. The chapter highlights the centrality of emotions in the ways women experience and negotiate discourses of beauty, race, skin color, and gender in their daily lives.

The chapter introduces questions of skin and flesh tones via a discussion of Pedro Almódovar's 2011 film The Skin I live in. The film suggests a number of themes that are pertinent to this book: skin and identity; the relations between inside and outside; the nude and its colour; artificial skin and fantasies of the human creation of life; skin, touch and the haptic potential of vision; finally, the relationship between skin's role as a medium and the mediality of the image; issues of the colour of the nude and the longstanding association of skin, flesh and colour. The introduction also situates the book within the most relevant art historical studies on skin, flesh and the materiality of the image as well as within the scholarly field of the history of the body and of skin.

This chapter explores the implications of skin bleaching in Africa and among populations of African descent throughout the diaspora. First, it examines the actual skin-bleaching process within the historical context of its transnational expansion. Second, it focuses on the materiality of the interplay of race and color, by which lightness is the key marker of distinction from Whiteness as well as from Blackness. It suggests that where attaining corporeal Whiteness is impossible for those racially Black (and dark), the desire for lightness is less about becoming White and more about becoming less Black in order to gain “certain aeasthetic and political-economic resources that pertain to being white.” The discussion is placed within the Ghanaian social and cultural field, in which racial aesthetics, while undoubtedly local, are shaped by and respond to transnational racial regimes.

In this line of his landmark speech, Martn Luther King Jr expressed the troubling reality faced by thousands of people who are judged by the “color of their skin” instead of by more valid attributes. His reference to a specific, seemingly innocuous physical feature makes the injustice of the situation all the more apparent. Why would anyone use skin color as a basis for serious judgment? What, if anything, makes this specific feature so special? This chapter considers two, non-opposing perspectives on these questions: category-based stereotyping and feature-based stereotyping.

This chapter focuses on the determination of racial ancestry in the 1920s. Popular notions about how one could determine racial ancestry began to shift away from an explanatory language based on blood to a system that understood race based on vision. The greater use of vision to ascertain race reflected the growing fears of the white population at a time when distinctions between the black and white races began to decline. The varying strategies adopted to determine Alice's skin color and ancestry speak to the uncertainties about both the source and the meaning of race in this era.

This chapter examines the shifts in beauty ideals in Indonesia during the colonial period by focusing on the emergence of two categories of whiteness: “European whiteness” and “Japanese whiteness.” It explains how circulations of people and ideas from the Netherlands and Japan gave rise to particular beauty ideals in colonial Indonesia and shows that what counted as light skin throughout these periods differed significantly over time. It highlights the complex construction of multiple categories of whiteness that emerged as a result of transnational circulations of people and ideas in Indonesia, along with attempts to conflate skin color with race and to dissociate these two categories of identity. By analyzing the process of representing Caucasian women as the face of beauty, the chapter demonstrates how racial projects of colonialism succeeded in conflating skin color with race.

This chapter introduces the theoretical concept of rasa and uses it to construct a historical account of skin color and gender hierarchies in Java prior to European colonization (late ninth and early tenth centuries). Through a reading of the Old Javanese adaptation of the Indian epic poem Ramayana, the chapter stresses the importance of color hierarchy even before European colonization and explains how it was articulated through affective vocabularies attached to notions of beauty. It argues that the conflation between lightness and light skin as desirable and darkness and dark skin as undesirable is registered through rasa. It shows that in Ramayana, women with light skin color are represented with positive rasa as beautiful and desirable, whereas people with dark skin color are depicted with negative rasa as undesirable and often terrifying. The chapter concludes by distinguishing rasa from affect and emotion.

This chapter investigates what kind of whiteness is being marketed in transnational women's magazines in post-Soeharto (post-1998) Indonesia. Using discourse and semiotic analyses, it decodes the meanings of various “signs” in whitening advertisements published in the Indonesian edition of Cosmopolitan magazine and tanning advertisements in the U.S. edition during the years 2006–2008. It argues that desire for “whiteness” is not the same as desire for “Caucasian whiteness” and cites a shift from Indonesian white beauty toward what it calls “cosmopolitan whiteness.” It considers how “cosmopolitan whiteness” is being marketed through Cosmopolitan's ads for skin-whitening products and highlights the “affective” construction of gender, race, and skin color.

Chapter 3 analyzes constructions of skin color and race in intended parents’ narratives about the experience of selecting an egg donor. This chapter shows how egg donors of different backgrounds are differently valued, bolstering social hierarchies. At the same time, the chapter describes the diversity of ways that intended parents approach race and skin tone when choosing an egg donor. In contrast to dominant assumptions that intended parents seek donors who match their own ethnic backgrounds in order to reproduce whiteness, the process of egg donation represented an opportunity for many intended parents to subvert racial hierarchies by selecting Indian donors with darker skin tones. The chapter argues that such narratives, however, misrecognize donor egg selection as an opening to challenge racial hierarchies; instead, such decisions rely on essentialized notions of race and beauty that exoticize Indian women and reflect new articulations of biological race.

This chapter provides a critical treatment of whiteness against a transnational web of visual technologies as they permeate the fabric of everyday life in India. The tide in the semiotics of skin color in India's visual economy of mobile and cross-cutting magazine, television, Internet, and film images oscillate between the binaristic opposing poles of “whiteness/lightness/fairness is generally positive” and “blackness/darkness/brownness is generally negative.” In globalizing India's shifting ethnoscapes, fluctuations in skin color are also tied to the greater rate of traffic in white and Indian female bodies that are moving across borders through new channels of mediated culture. Finally, the cultural politics of the epidermis in India also haunts the visual field of postcolonial national state politics, an arena that presents opportunities for future work.

The epilogue focuses on Charles Blanc's 1867 Grammaire des arts du dessin, a normative theory of the visual arts. The author takes the traditional view that drawing unites all art forms and is superior to colour, but the way he establishes this point is very much a product of his time as many of his arguments are biologically grounded. He argues for the supremacy of drawing by associating it with the allegedly natural hierarchy between the genders, and for the supremacy of white skin by linking it to drawing. What is more, discussing the then newly theorised principles of optical mixture he connects the non-mixing of colours in divisionist painterly practices with the segregation of humans of different colours and makes a biologist plea for political segregationism. Arguing that the superiority of humans is expressed in the nakedness and monochromy of their skin, Blanc divides between skin and the colourful materiality of flesh which he confines to the inner body. Summarising the argument of the book, the epilogue concludes that early modern notions of flesh tones do not draw such a line between skin and flesh, and open up the possibility of seeing any body as being fluid and multicoloured.