Blackness

Hunting for a reference to something that I remembered reading as a child, that Merle Oberon damaged her skin by excessive use of 'Fair and Lovely', a skin whitening cream popular in India, I googled my way to this blog about a New York mother who was shocked at the blackness of her adopted Indian daughter's skin color (does every emotion, however crass, make its way into the public domain these days?). Interestingly, I happened to be reading this:

The doctor was a blackish Indian, about twenty-five years old. None of us now, of course, suffers from colour prejudice--it is so low brow--but I must confess that it was rather a shock to see so dark an Indian in this Shan interior, and when I looked at his little wife, the Karen, colour prejudice did not seem so far-fetched. ........... I looked at her husband again. He must be a nice man if she was so happy. But it was hard to believe it on account of his appearance, though Rossiter told me afterwards that he had an admirable character.

This from Maurice Collis (Lords of the sunset: A tour in the Shan States, New York, Dodd Mead and Company, 1958) after he has repeatedly self-congratulated himself on how, unlike the other English in India, he could treat the Indians as equals. What is it about the blackness of the Doctor's skin that so shocked Collis in the 1930s? And, how could someone in the cosmopolitan twenty first century be surprised or shocked by black skin?

No answers. Just thought I'd share this. Meanwhile, my millions of readers, any ideas on a reference that shows that Merle Oberon destroyed her skin by using whitening creams?