1 Gosh-all-fish-hooks! For one thing, I have yet to see tooth whitening products that do a damn thing (don't work on my wife and me, but I guess we should cut out the red wine). I'll also say that some of my black friends (especially women) have teeth that are incredibly white. I don't know if they use any products to make it happen.


And there are many white women who love to spend expendable summer hours basking in the sun, which (gasp) tans their skin, if it doesn't turn it salmon-red. This process is unhealthy and can lead to melanoma if you're not careful, but that's not the point. Lots of women who tan are also racist and denigrate black women.

There is an almost universal tendency for people to denigrate darker "races" (for lack of a better term). Why? In fact, the only place where it doesn't happen is in the Seychelles Islands, where people are, pardon the term, generally very promiscuous; and "looking down" on darker people doesn't work because they are generally your relatives. There, the discrimination is between north to south. Hmmm, sound like here?

2 You know Dana, that last is interesting; I read of a study done once on men and it is universally true that gentlemen (and not so gentleman) DO prefer blonds. I mean, they went places like Papua New Guinnea and Outer Mongolia and found that ALL men found lighter skinned and haired women more attractive then darker ones. The authors of the study theorized it's a very basic appeal; a lighter skinned woman with blond hair seems younger and therefore healthier than a darker skinned woman. Young girls often are lighter in complexion and hair coloring, which darkens as they age (no doubt a mechanism necessary to protect them from sun damage and to keep them from standing out to predators when they have to go out to gather in a hunter-gatherer society.) The light coloration would be useful for mating - like a peacock's tail, it would stand out.

So gentlemen really do prefer lighter skin and hair. Kind of sucks for black women.

3 As a corollary, it explains why a lot of white women go for "tall, dark, and handsome" and why so many are attracted to black men; darker means you are out there bringing down the mastadons. It suggests a man who is healthy and enterprising - at least from our paleolithic ancestry.