IT'S STRONGER THAN DIRT

 (The title is taken from a jingle in an old old commercial for Ajax laundry detergent, and the following is a quick commentary from a political forum in which one poster had linked to an article on Asian "whitewashing," i.e, artificial skin-bleaching, and its putative connection to "whiteness.")

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Yes, it's not always clear how much some of these "lightness fetishes" really stem from "whiteness as such."

For instance, I remember a tidbit from Burton's ARABIAN NIGHTS translation, where translator Burton claimed that the high-caste Brahmins of India did not consider the British colonials "white" in comparison to themselves. He claimed that they called the Brits "red men" because they had so little resistance to the Indian sun that they were frequently sunburned. If this nugget is veracious, those Brahmins weren't fetishizing "lightness" because of any hidden envy of the British overlords; it was their strategy of differentiating themselves from the more numerous darker skins of India, somewhat along the lines of Doctor Seuss's "Sneetches." 

It's also a little hard for me to believe that a huge swathe of Asians still seek lightness of skin because they remember the decades-old dominance of colonial Europe. I guess it's a little more possible that they harbor some subconscious envy of the economic juggernaut of the United States and its worldwide promotion of capitalism. But of course Asians had their own version of capitalism long before Marco Polo, as we see with feudal China's colonial attitude toward neighboring Asians. So the argument of "whiteness as such" still seems forced at best.