The various shades of colour in human skin are due primarily to the presence of melanin, a pigment that protects the skin from ultraviolet radiation, but fat content and thickness of the skin likewise play their roles, as do blood circulation and varying levels of carotene. Pigments are found mainly in the inner region of the many-layered epidermis (the outer skin). Over 300 years ago, the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi localized the black colour of ‘Negroid skin’ in this ‘intermediate layer’, ‘for when it is washed and kept for a long time in lukewarm water, its colour does not change, but remains black, whereas the true skin (cutis), and the epidermis appear almost as white as those of other persons’. Today we know that the cells responsible for producing pigmentation, the melanocytes, are located here and that their variable and genetically determined activity is the sole determinant for individual skin tone and classification according to ‘racial type’.
Even in ancient times human beings were aware of varying shades of colour in individuals and groups in the world around them. For people living on the shores of the Mediterranean — who themselves were usually well tanned — both the ‘black’ skin of Africans to the extreme south and the pallid ‘whiteness’ of peoples in the far north seemed remarkable; Homer and Xenophanes made mention of it, as did, above all, Herodotus and a majority of his fellow geographers in the Greco-Roman world. Early on the Greeks and their students raised the question about the origin and nature of ‘coloured’ skin, which also contained hidden within it the question about the relationship of various peoples to one another. They traced the ‘blackness’ of Africans and the ‘pallor’ of ‘Northmen’ to their extreme and inhospitable environments (blazing sun and gloomy cold), and were the first to associate ‘coloured people’ with what they viewed as the uncivilized outer limits of their world and a ‘barbaric’ way of life.
In much the same way that, in Greco-Roman antiquity, ‘barbarians’ were found far from the civilized centre of human life, for later Christian missionaries coloured ‘heathens’ lived at a geographical and spiritual distance from God. Christians at first showed little concern for the origin and nature of skin colour and were more interested in the ‘eternal soul’ than in the composition of its mortal shell. But working to the detriment of ‘coloureds’ was the age-old Christian symbolism by which ‘white’ and ‘black’ were opposites associated with light and darkness, beauty and ugliness, innocence and sin, good and evil, God and Satan. Whereas ‘white’ was held to be more or less ennobling, a person was discredited by dark skin, which was interpreted as a token of, or sometimes even as the result of, a challenge to Christian norms. Despite the fundamental equality before God postulated by the Church, a converted ‘heathen’ could not be washed ‘white’ even by baptism and so in fact remained generally (and even disconcertingly) a Christian of second rank.
Since the sixteenth century, Europeans have seen ‘coloured’ peoples not only as being far from civilization and God, but also and above all as distant from the centres of capital. In the same way as the Church dealt with ‘heathens’, now ‘coloureds’, who previously had been of no ‘economic use’, were integrated into the global economy — treated not as equals among equals as in the Christian community, but rather subjected simply on the basis of a different skin colour and as a matter of principle, to political, economic, and social discrimination. In a differentiated colour spectrum, ‘white’ now stood for the functions of management and planning, whereas ‘black’, for instance, meant ‘common’ (manual) labour and ‘red’ meant something to be excluded as worthless.
Against this background, it should be emphasized that during the era of colonialism numerous theories concerning the origin and nature of skin colour asserted, almost without exception, the ‘natural’ inferiority of ‘coloureds’. Some scholars thus called into question the Church's dogma of a single origin for all humankind (so-called ‘monogenism’), and resolved the discrepancy with a second creation. For the physician Philippus Paracelsus (1491-1541), the philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the biblical scholar and philosopher Isaak la Peyrère (1594-1676), and even Voltaire and Goethe, certain groups like the indigenous inhabitants of the ‘American islands’ were ‘lower’ creatures, so-called ‘pre-Adamites’, created simultaneously with the animals on the sixth day of creation. Other theorists, remaining faithful to the Church's worldview, rejected such ‘heretical’ ideas and defended the theory of a single Adam, a belief deeply rooted in the Christian faith. In his Mémoire sur l'origine des Nègres et des Américains (1733), the Jesuit priest August Malfert retained the theory of monogenism by applying moral theology and interpreting the black colour of Africans as a kind of mark of Cain — which did not do ‘coloureds’ much good, since it thereby turned the individual stigmatization of a single evil-doer into the collective punishment of a whole ‘race’. Finally, a secularized version of such explanatory attempts was provided by a third group of protoscientific theories, in which climate, the chemical environment, or illness assumed the role of a just and vengeful God. The American physician Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), for example, having observed that black children are significantly lighter in the first days after birth than they will be, relatively, as adults, explained the colour of blacks as the hereditary consequence of illness, in this case of leprosy. For Rush ‘Negroes’ were therefore not the product of a second creation, but simply ill; their blackness was to be understood as a deviation from a healthy condition and in need of rectification. In other words, the doctor wanted to combat racial discrimination with medicine and even appealed to the work of the English chemist Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), who had already used ‘oxygenated muriatic acid to almost bleach’ the hand of an African — prompting one wag to suggest that ‘bleaching societies’ be sent to Africa along with missionaries.
A major division of modern physical anthropology now concerns itself, for the first time since antiquity, with the question of the origin and nature of skin colour but without regard to any social or cosmological notions of rank — since these lie outside the limits of scientific inquiry. Yet, because the residue of a long series of traditional theories on skin colour, which were influenced by such cosmology, continues to determine public perception even today, and because the influence of such a mindset is not always adequately taken into account in the formation of scientific theory, such notions are occasionally incorporated into particular theories. One cannot therefore rule out the possibility that ‘coloureds’ will continue to be marginalized and discriminated against — even in cellular or genetic research. The extent to which researchers are successful in overriding such discrimination remains to be seen.
— Peter Martin
See also albino; pigmentation; skin.
