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,