Today, Peter Frost notes, skin color has a primarily ethnic meaning:
It had other meanings in the past, apparently even our nonhuman past. In many primate species, the infant is light-skinned, and this coloration not only identifies the infant as an infant but also induces feelings of caring and protectiveness in the adult observer. At some point in human evolution, the same coloration was acquired by women, along with other visual, audible, and tactile characteristics of the infant. Skin color thus became a means to distinguish women from men, with lighter skin being unconsciously perceived as feminine and darker skin as masculine. Such perceptions would influence an observer’s behavioral and emotional state when interacting with a man, a woman, or a young child.
In modern Western societies, those gendered perceptions have been so eclipsed by ethnic ones that they remain largely unconscious. But they are still part of conscious experience elsewhere in the world.
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