Our toxic obsession with lighter skin

Countless black people waste money on treatments to whiten their faces. But Indians are just as misguided about skin colour. The man for whom my mother was originally imported to Britain to marry rejected her on sight because he thought she was too dark, forcing her to find another husband. She was an exceptionally beautiful young woman, but his colour prejudice blinded him to her.

Now a new Indian cream, Fair and Handsome, is selling like hotcakes in Asian neighbourhoods across the UK. Its ads feature a dark and gormless geek who has no luck with women, whose fortune suddenly changes when he starts smearing himself with pigment-bleaching chemicals. The patent nonsense of this will be apparent to any white guy who's ever hit on an Asian girl and inevitably found it harder than breaking into Fort Knox.

Meanwhile, women in places as far-flung as Gambia, Pakistan and Mexico have suffered from mercury poisoning and chronic acne brought on by such products.

Black and brown people are obsessed with skin colour. They don't have a desire to "be white", but are subject to complex bigotries within their own cultures. In the subcontinent, light skin has historically been linked with high caste; hence many of India's most successful models are almost Europeanlooking, such as the fair and green-eyed Aishwarya Rai.

The neuroses that black people have about their colour are a direct legacy of slavery, when mulattos held better domestic positions in the plantations, and often lived freely, while blackskinned "field niggers" toiled in chains.

Among black people, mixed-race women have the position of being "blondes", much-prized trophies. A fair-skinned friend of mine gets a lot of hatred directed at her by black women on the street, resentful of the pedestal that she's been placed on simply for having a white parent. The deep racial self-loathing still exists to the extent that the hierarchy of preference among many young black men has mixed-race women at the top, followed by white women, with black women trailing in third place.

Despite the diverse images of beauty we have in this society - from Naomi Campbell through to Shilpa Shetty, and indeed the rather dashing photo that accompanies this column - black and brown people still carry a lot of empty hang-ups about their colour. It really is time they lightened up - on the inside, that is.