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Comment by jayess | Hacker News Reader

You should visit Latin America. Everyone is judged by their skin tone. The darker you are, the more you are regarded as "the help." Parents are excited when their children are born with light skin. My in-laws are all Mexican and I can say that they are far more racist than any US citizen I've met.

I'm not even sure it's really "racism." But I do know that it's considered completely normal to think of others this way.

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It's completely racism, dark skin color is an indication of non-European (priamrily either African or American indigenous) ancestry, and what you describe is a outgrowth of racism in which Europeans are favorered and the other two groups disfavored.

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever been involved with was when I went on a tour of guatemala with a group of med students from California. The kids were almost entirely children of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. They talked about differences in religion, in folklore, in parenting, in language — but one thing they absolutely agreed on was that people with light skin were lucky — and they talked about how to make their skin look lighter, etc.

It was really an eye opening conversation to me — how deep the impact of colonialism has been on those countries and how it even spreads through generations and across boundaries.

This is also true in China, and to varying extents everywhere else in Asia. Dark skin is an indication of low birth, pale creamy skin is considered desirable.

e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/latest-trend-sweeping-china-lig...

The term you are looking for is “colorism”

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