I have pale blue eyes, like both my parents and all four of my grandparents. My wife has rich, deep, dark brown eyes. Her father, of Czech-Croatian ancestry, had blue eyes; her mother, of Afro-Colombian heritage, had brown.
Our daughter Heloise Cerys, eight weeks old today, has blue eyes. As many folks know, a baby’s eye color can change dramatically in the first year of life. My wife was born with blue eyes, and they gradually shifted to brown over the course of several months. We think our daughter is gorgeous and perfect and amazing, and her eyes are beautiful — and her mother and I have no particular stake in seeing them stay blue or turn brown, green, or what-have-you. We care that her eyes work to help her see the world, not what color the irises are.
But my goodness, we’ve been taken aback by the number of folks who, when meeting her or seeing her pictures, remark not only about the beauty of her blue eyes but who openly express a hope that they “stay blue.” And it’s gotten to the point that I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t something vaguely racist about the obsession with having light eyes. No one has said “Well, I hope they turn brown” — but plenty have said “Oh, I hope they stay blue.” Perhaps they are politely acknowledging our daughter’s evident perfection. But I somehow doubt that if her eyes were brown, we’d be getting many people saying things like “Oh gosh, how lovely; I hope they stay brown and don’t turn blue!”
My daughter is mixed race, and that will be true regardless of her appearance. She will likely be lighter than her mother and darker than her father, and her final eye color is yet to be determined. And perhaps I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I’ve heard too much praise of “blue” with an implied slur against “brown” in recent weeks to let it pass.
UPDATE: Reader B sends me this link to a great discussion at Racialicious on this topic: Brown Eyes.
Uh, when I asked you the other day on Facebook if they were still blue, I was merely just curious. I have brown eyes and love them. I think you are reading a bit too much into this…
PS. You needed tell me that you had no preference, either, because I already knew that. Sorry, but I can’t help but feel that by giving Cerys a pink gift and by asking if her eyes were blue, that I was making some subtle sexist or racist statement. This bugs me.
Sorry — I should have wrote “need not” instead of needed.
Both I and the father of my sons are blue-eyed, which meant from a genetic standpoint that, barring actual gene mutation during cell division, any and all children we had were going to be blue-eyed. Both their father and I also have large, clear, widely spaced, well-shaped eyes with thick curly lashes, which made it likely that any and all children we had were also going to have unusually lovely and striking eyes (which they both do). They still get comments from strangers about the beauty of their eyes, even at their advanced ages (which does not thrill them and which they blame me for even though I point out that their father’s eyes are just as much to blame, lol), and when they were babies it was ridiculous.
I do remember, though, the obsession with the blueness of their eyes–and now I’m wondering, if all their other eye traits had remained the same, and merely the color had changed–would the near-orgasmic raptures that people used to go into (and still do sometimes) over the beauty of their eyes be the same..?
(I’m sure you know this already, but given the genetic heritage you describe Cerys having, her eyes really could go any which way, color-wise. I always thought that would be much more interesting than just knowing they’d be blue, like with my kids–I had to guess on hair color for the interest factor. Mine’s dark blonde, their father’s is medium brown, and we both have closely related redheads, pale blondes and black-haired folks in the family, so at least that was exciting to anticipate.
)
You might know this too already…the first blue eyes were a wild genetic mutation–we all had brown eyes originally, and had them for thousands of years before the first mutant blue-eyed person showed up (genetically, all of us blue-eyed people have the same, single individual mutant ancestor). The theory is that the mutation didn’t select against survival in colder regions (whereas it would have in hotter ones–melanin) and that’s why you have all these blue-eyed people of northern European and Scandinavian descent.
Rambling, sorry.
Taking a break from work and clearly NOT wanting to get back to it!
Mermade, it wasn’t you, trust me — what I’ve been getting was much more explicit than that. You never expressed a hope that her eyes wouldn’t turn brown! (And you know I LOVE pink!) Who’s reading too much into this now?
I had heard, Lisa, about the genetic mutation — but somehow you expressed it more succinctly than I have heard it said in the past.
Thank you for the clarification!
It’s funny you mentioned this. I’m of Sweedish decent and have very pale skin, blonde hair, and bright blue eyes. My optometrist joked yesterday that I’d “make the perfect Aryan”. Seriously. I don’t think you’re reading too much into the notion of eye color. There’s most definitely a preference for light skin, hair, and eyes. I wonder where this disturbing preference originated and why people are so obsessed with blue eyes… I happen to like mine, but not any more than I would be if I were born with brown.
There’s definitely something very racist about it. Not that any of those individuals are are consciously malicious, but the widespread cultural preference for fair skin, fair hair, pale eyes — it’s the very definition of racist, isn’t it?
At least they didn’t say, ‘I hope they stay blue and you two are the kind of people who should be parents’.
Blue eyes are rare, and the color is very noticeable. I have grass green eyes, which do not have the same effect as the cerulean blue that some of my relatives happened to get…few people rhapsodize about my eye color, but my blue-eyed relatives hear it frequently.
I have bright blue eyes and have been haunted by that song ‘she’s got eyes of the bluest sky, reminds me of childhood memories’ by that bandana wearing rrrraaaaark band. So don’t worry, any favouritism will be countered. My eyes have not, as far as I can tell, brought me any significant fortune. And what about that far superior song ‘brown eyed girl’, and who could forget, ‘don’t you make my brown eyes blue’. I’m sure many people around you have fallen in love with a beautiful blue eyed baby, and want her to stick around as she is.
Interesting post…
I think your friends meant well but, still, were disrespectuf of your daughter’s background (and mother, still, interestingly, you’re making it quite clear in this post that brown colour in your daughter’s irises in the future would come from her, which genetically speaking, would not necessarily be the case!)
And yes, there is a form of racism in it.
people usually tend to idealize child-bearing as a reproduction of the selves, which in my view tells a lot about their being happy, or unhappy with their own existences.
Culturally, I’m surprised at your friends’ reaction. (i defenitely would have thought a longer history of mixed origins would have made things easier….
Thank you for posting this. I have never really understood our society’s obsession with blue eyes. I often feel that brown eyes are much more attractive than blue (I have blue eyes, but have wistfully longed for brown eyes at many points).
I have three boys. One has blue eyes, one has green eyes, and one has brown. When they were babies, and now when they are no longer babies, people have commented on the color and beauty of their eyes. People are enchanted by newborns. I don’t think the comments about her eyes or her gender are racist or sexist. They are comments by people falling under the newborn spell. They simply can’t imagine your little girl being anything but what she is.
With my nickname, I had to jump in with the color issue. Most people prefer the color blue to the color brown in general. The average person of any ethnicity would reach for a blue goblet rather than a brown one, a blue shirt rather than a brown one. Did you know you have blue lettering, blue background, blue sky on your blog here? Maybe you should switch your banner to brown earth and your lettering to brown. How about beige background? Brown earth is usually associated with the earth goddess, while blue sky is associated with male sky gods.
Relax. Children will give you plenty to worry about for the rest of your life. Just enjoy the big baby blues, browns, hazels for now staring at you with love and curiosity.
Lisa, my expectations for my kids was just the opposite. I am very fair with light brown hair and greenish blue eyes, but my husband is Sri Lankan Tamil, with black hair, very dark skin, and very dark brown eyes. So it was always pretty much a given that our kids would take after him, with dark hair and dark eyes. My only hope going in was that one of them would have brown hair instead of black (and the youngest does, so my genes have had some influence on him, anyway).
So I never, ever heard anyone obsess about blue eyes about my kids. Because that was just never going to happen. We (and they, now) do get lots of comments about how pretty their eyes are, though. I think people do just like to comment on these things and will sometimes say asinine things without thinking about it (my most frequent, when the boys were babies, was when people would ask where I adopted them from after going on about how cute they are–because apparently they can’t be mine).
Rather than wonder why they say this about blue eyes, why not ask them?
Having spent my teenage years failing to perm, curling iron, and pincurl my absolutely straight blond hair into some kind of waviness, I’ve never seen any advantage to the whole blond hair/blue eye thing. My husband-of-Italian-descent passed on his thick brown hair to all three of our kids. This will serve them well when they get older since blond hair is more fragile – as long as my grandfather’s baldness doesn’t get passed down to my sons. Two out of three inherited green eyes from my father-in-law; one inherited the brown from my husband. The important thing is that all three kids are creative, interested, friendly people that care about others. The expression in their eyes is what counts, not the color.
“I have bright blue eyes and have been haunted by that song ’she’s got eyes of the bluest sky, reminds me of childhood memories’ by that bandana wearing rrrraaaaark band.”
My mom used to tell me that that song reminded her of me.
“I think your friends meant well but, still, were disrespectuf of your daughter’s background (and mother, still, interestingly, you’re making it quite clear in this post that brown colour in your daughter’s irises in the future would come from her, which genetically speaking, would not necessarily be the case!)”
Actually, barring genetic mutation, that would be the case. Blue-eyed people don’t have any genes for brown eyes, again unless actual gene mutation is involved (which is rare, though I have known one person to whom that did happen–one of his eyes was half-brown, half-blue). Blue-eyed genes are recessive, which means for them to express, the person with the blue eyes must have only blue-eyed genes. If he had one brown-eyed gene and one blue-eyed gene, or two blue-eyed genes, brown eyes would be the only color expressed.
I’m very fond of my eyes. Both my parents are blue-eyed, so it’s not surprising that I am too.
You’ve made me wonder why exactly I am pleased to have the eyes I do. I can find two reasons. First, I am glad that they are my dad’s, not my mum’s. I look so like my mum that even my dad has occasionally mistaken me for her, and they’ve been married nearly thrity years. There’s very little evidence of my dad in me, so I cling to what little there is – I have his eyes.
Second, and much less justifiably, I take pride in their being very blue, with no grey in them. I honestly don’t know why I think grey-blue would be inferior. I don’t think it’s racism – I don’t think blue is better than brown or green, or even perfectly grey – but I have a certain snobbishness about purity of eye colour. Interesting.
scuse me. “If he had one brown-eyed gene and one blue-eyed gene, or tow BROWN-eyed genes, brown eyes would be the only color expressed.”
Note: Green is different (codominant).
I have light brown eyes, but both of my kids have eyes of an unusual and striking blue, and I, too, have thought that the praise they’ve received for the color of their eyes has bordered on the distasteful. The subtext to people’s comments seemed to be “brown is so common,” and I found it interesting that they would say this to my face.
I’m really suprised there’s such an issue with eye colour – and I didn’t even realise brown was more usual than blue. All my immediate family have blue, so that seems common to me. I have friends with amazing pools of dark brown which I have envied as men seem to fall willingly into them. My blue peepers never seemed as exciting to me though,blue seems a bit less interesting (no offence to Cerys I am certain she is a vision). So what do you know, I guess, at least in the US, I am a priveledged minority regarding eye colour.
This has always been a sticky one for me. I can understand some of the racist undertones when it comes to eye color but when I step back and look all of humanity, I like that there is such variation. Sometimes I feel like it would be a shame to lose that but then I recoil at how racist that thought can become. Blue eyes are in a definite small minority in this world, just like red hair and a hundred other things. Tough one to talk about.
24 comments and no mention of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye? Really?
Plus, from people who would know:
http://www.racialicious.com/2008/04/08/brown-eyes/
I have blue eyes, and my husband has brown. I must admit that when my daughter was born, I really hoped her eyes would stay blue. Everyone remarks on how much she looks like my husband, and her blue eyes are something that are visibly from me.
I understanding finding something a bit odd about commenting on how uncommon blue eyes are in a world of brown eyes. At the same time, more & more “unique” names are being used for the same reason, and I’m not sure what makes that different. (I don’t doubt that for some people it is preferred for racist reasons, but I’m just thinking of the issues that have come up for us.)
Yikes. Sorry for the grammatical errors!
B, thanks for a wonderful link!
My personal experience has been a little different. Blue eyes are the norm in the community that I grew up in, but my eyes are brown like my father’s.
He always joked that he would send back any children with blue eyes.
I had some plastic baby figurines as a kid and in the product description it listed the eye colors you could choose from. I specifically remember that it listed blue last and described it as the “prettiest of all”.
I can understand why people would like blue eyes, but it seems not so great to place expectations on a baby’s eyes to be blue, or any particular color, from both anti-racist and general body acceptance standpoints.
There’s definitely something very racist about it. Not that any of those individuals are are consciously malicious, but the widespread cultural preference for fair skin, fair hair, pale eyes — it’s the very definition of racist, isn’t it?
Daisy Bond hit it on the head. My daughter’s father was of Irish descent, and had blue eyes. Everyone in his large, extended family had blue eyes. Everyone. So, when my daughter was born with her mother’s dark brown eyes…..it caused some comment. See, it’s a common myth (at least, here in Illinois) that “all Caucasian babies are born with blue eyes”. It isn’t true, (certainly not in my family, or anyone else of mediterranean background), but yeah—it’s code for who’s “really white”. It was even taught in my sophomore health class at school that all Caucasian babies are born with blue eyes; the teacher then ad-libbed to the white boys present that a brown-eyed baby from a white wife or girlfriend was proof of cheating.
My daughter has extraordinary eyes. Can’t recall anyone outside my family commenting on that, though.
I don’t know about blue eyes being a test of pure caucasion blood. I have strong South American ancestory and the butt (also a universal tendency in my family) to prove it, so my blue eyes prove nothing of the sort.
You can get strange results with recessive genes. My wife is of Black Irish background (her, her parents, and all her grandparents have brown eyes, dark hair, and can get dark tans) and I am blond, blue eyed, and fair skinned with lots of freckles. All three of our children have blue eyes, one is dark haired, two are blond, one gets a great tan, one is fair skinned with freckles, and the other has a skin tone halfway between his parents.
One of the fascinating things I learned in a genetics class is that there is, in fact, a dominant allele for blue eyes. I thought that was odd, having always heard it was recessive. But my spouse’s parents both have blue eyes, and two of their three children have hazel eyes; the other, dark brown. So I guess that prof knew what he was talking about! My mother has dark brown eyes, but they were born blue, and didn’t change till she was three.
I once saw a woman with blue eyes that had splotches of brown in them, which makes me wonder if she wasn’t some sort of chimera. I was fascinated by them, because they were so unusual.
Some physical characteristic can be desired without the desire being “racist”.
We are allowed to have our esthetic druthers.
I expect blue eyes were actually handy in the north country where winter nights were long. Brown eyes help to screen out UV and function, barely, as sun glasses. Both are necessary in the tropics.
In the long twilights and dawns of the northern winters, you might want to see just a bit better. Or die.
Worrying about folks’ reaction to Hugo’s daughter’s eyes is the sort of thing you’d get if your worldview obssessed you, and the lack of sleep hasn’t yet brought you to what’s really important…. That is, can you parent effectively when you are so sleepy you’re bumping into walls.
Well, the more moral failures there are, the more distinguished are the Professionally Incredibly Wonderful.
So it pays to see moral failings all around you.
Reminds me of when I was pregnant with daughter #2 and I was talking to the eight-year-old boy who lived next door (his family was African-American). Naturally he was very curious about the baby-to-be, and he mentioned something about how the baby’s eyes would be brown when she was born. I explained to him that most white babies are born with blue eyes. That blew him away. Babies with blue eyes? How freaky was that?! It took him a while to be reassured I wasn’t messing with him.
Said baby, who was and is pale, blonde and with light blue eyes, spent much of her younger years insisting that her eyes were REALLY green like mine.
Re: the teacher then ad-libbed to the white boys present that a brown-eyed baby from a white wife or girlfriend was proof of cheating
That’s really, really messed up right there- it could contribute to breaking up relationships, or even worse.
Blue and green eyes aren’t _uniquely_ a European thing, there are some North Indians and Central Asians who have them. (Although that could be a genetic legacy from Alexander’s invasion). As for the reference to South American ancestry, of course the Spanish are partially of Northern European (namely, Visigothic) descent, and there was a lot of immigration to Latin America from Northern as well as Southern Europe.
Seems like no matter what nature comes up with, there’s someone who will use it to make up myths about people. Keep up the examining.
Hector – I get the blue eyes from the Irish/Eastern European side of my family (father)the latin features from the Argentinian side (my mother) – my Argentian grandfather and 1/2 Argentinian aunt and both her kids have brown eyes – although, yes, there is a bit of Argentinian Welsh in there too (I’m well aware of the origins of my own hertage thanks! I think it is safe to say that brown eyes are a typically latin feature, they’re also fairly typical of Spanish people. My point was that there is no litmus test for a ‘pure’ strain of human appearance – because such a thing does not exist.
Some physical characteristic can be desired without the desire being “racistâ€.
We are allowed to have our esthetic druthers.
Except that our “esthetic druthers” are strongly influenced by society. If you look across cultures and time, there is absolutely no one universal idea of beauty. What we prefer is heavily shaped by what society says is desirable. Sometimes these messages stem from racist feelings. Any suggestion of lighter being better is highly suspect.
B.
It is not always true that socially-imposed esthetic druthers are racist.
Racism is action based on racialism which is a doctrine that some races are inferior and some superior.
Thus, liking blue eyes is not racist because it says nothing about inferior or superior. Both those concepts are applied to something in the real world such as intelligence.
Blue eyes strike some as more attractive than other colors. Nothing racist about that because there’s nothing “Better” about it in the real world.
In addition, cross-cultural studies have found general agreement among men about the ideally desirable figure in women. Eskimos and Tierra del Fuegans and Europeans have about the same.
So that is not socially imposed.
In the blue eyes issue, who said lighter is better? Nobody. Okay, we can drop the we’re so superior we can spot racism where nobody else can find it schtick now.
I suppose it would be okay to suggest that pale blue eyes would be a handicap in the Sahara, right? “Better?” “Not better?” Racist?
Here’s an anecdote I found interesting when I spotted it. In 1969, I was in Infantry Officer Candidate School. Just for grins, and because I’d done some anthro in college, I counted the blue eyes among my non-Hispanic white brethren. About 70%. Should be 40%, based on the population at large.
Who’s blue? Anglo-Saxon Aryans? Not as much as the Celts.
Eric Haney in his book on Delta Force describes his ancestry. Celts and Danes. James Webb in “Born Fighting”, Celts. In “The Painted People”, considerably older, the author points out that the greatest fortifications in Europe faced the Celts. The Antonine Wall, Hadrian’s Wall, the great castles on the Welsh Marches. There were places on the Continent where castles took advantage of natural defensed, but the ones which had to be built huge without them were the ones facing Celts.
Who, said the author further, were the foundation of the British Army’s eighteenth and nineteenth century victories won by balls-out charges. There were other victories, such as Waterloo, which were defensive. He wasn’t speaking of them.
In his memoirs of WW I, Robert Graves quotes a Brit officer who said the Highland regiments charge “too fast”, and it was the Scots Greys who charged through the enemy and almost went off the battlefield at Waterloo.
And Aubrey’s grunt buddies were mostly blue-eyed, as he is himself.
Now, that kind of behavior is spread out in space, time, and basic culture to an extent which would force a review of “socially imposed”, although, afaik, nobody’s looked into it either way.
The first woman to whom I was seriously attracted was dark, with very dark brown eyes–Balkan ancestry. Then there was blue eyes, which, in retrospect, might have been contacts, although she said nothing about them. In those days, contacts were not so congenial as now, and people who wore them would occasionally talk about taking them out or something under them and she did not. But when she mentioned blonding her hair, I doubted.
My wife has blue eyes.
In the grand scheme of things…it means nothing.
All of which is to say, this is nonsense about nothing which Hugo will think of fondly as easy days when he’s mainlining Nestles.
Richard: Whatever you’re trying to say with all that military history and anecdote, I’m not following.
I have extremely pale blue eyes and love getting compliments on them, because I’m very near-sighted so getting a compliment makes me think that “hey, at least they’re good for something, har har.”
But I have definitely received so-called compliments that originate in racism. For example – back when my blog banner very prominently featured my eyes, far-right wackos would show up on my blog, comment about my relationship with an Arab man, and then say something like “and your children WON’T have those gorgeous blue eyes if you stay with him!” This actually happened more than once. More than twice. More than thrice, even.
I just shrugged at the hatred and ignorance at that point (oddly enough, my boyfriend’s mother’s eyes are blue, so if we do reproduce, who knows what our kids will look like?).
I think that blue eyes, pale blue eyes especially, can be startling in a certain light and in pictures – which is why so many people love ‘em. I love my eyes as well, even though they cost me a lot in contacts.
Also, blue eyes are statistically rarer, hence they are treated as more “special” somehow.
But you can’t deny that there is a certain racialized beauty standard – especially in regards to women and eyes.
I’ve read that in the 1930′s, blue eyes were used by the eugenics movement to encourage racist reproductive policies.
In the blue eyes issue, who said lighter is better? Nobody.
Blue is lighter than brown.
People were expressing to Hugo that they hoped his baby’s eyes would stay blue. Doesn’t sound like “nobody” to me.
As for the rest of your comment, I really have no idea what you’re trying to convey.
B. Blue is lighter than brown. Yeah. So?
The people who said they wished Hugo’s daughter’s eyes would remain blue were saying they liked blue better, not that it was better according to some external standard.
The racism involved in reproaching someone for having friends with other than blue eyes is not related to blue eyes being better. It uses blue eyes as a tell for a particular race, one which the racists favored. They could have used a last name as a tell instead, and then where would this argument be?
The military history is about blue eyes associated with violence. You can, superficially, make the case that Celts and violence are more related than other races and violence. That means blue eyes and violence. The point is, so?
You can go any way you like in this issue and get to the same place. Nowhere.
For something to be “better”, it has to approach an agreed-upon external standard more closely than something else, which would be “not better”.
With no external standard, there is no “better” other than personal preference.
I happen to like baroque music. I can’t say it’s better than other music. According to what standard? More complicated than African-American spirituals? Who says complicated is better? Nobody. More structured than New Age music? Who says structure is better? Nobody.
But if you were on a college campus and had nothing better to do, you could see that baroque music arose in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War where Central Europe, earlier the comfortable domain of the farmer and the merchant, was now the domain of over 300 petty baronies. Each little barony had its little castle and its little chapel and its little orchestra and its little army and was surrounded by starving peasants. So a liking for baroque music could be said to indicate an liking for oppression. Which would make as much sense as claiming the interest in blue eyes is racist.
BTW, melanin protects against excess UV. In the north, where there is a shortage of UV, there is a related shortage of Vitamin D, leading to ricketts and other problems. So blonde skin, more transparent to UV, would be “better”. Is that racist?
Blue may be lighter than brown, but not all blues are the same. My eyes are one of my few physical attributes that I’ve always gotten compliments on. They’re blue, but a deeper shade of blue. People comment on the darkness specifically when commenting on them. Pale blue eyes, while preferable to some over brown, don’t get the same play. So I’m really not sure this breaks down to lighter=better.
The fact that blue eyes are interweaved with whites and brown with brown may play a role, but it isn’t inherently so. I don’t notice a strong connection between compliments on my eyes and suspicion-inducing ideas about race. In the two ideas that come to mind, interracial dating was in their history.
I personally have never had a preference for eye-color. I do like uniqueness, though. My wife’s eyes are brown, but they have a fascinating green trim around the edges. I like that sort of thing. Others, though, like more vibrant color.
::sigh:: As a kid I wanted blue eyes instead of brown, so The Bluest Eye kind of struck a nerve when I read it later.
These days, I guess I like contrast. The unusual and the visually striking. Blue eyes and black hair. Blonde hair and dark eyes. Dark skin and light eyes. The sort of stuff that happens when we haphazardly mix disparate genes.
The people who used to compliment me the most on my eyes being hazel or greenish (personally I think that’s a stretch except maybe in bright sun) were my Mexican friends. But it was explained to me that that eye color was read not so much as white, but as mixed.
I think there’s plenty of capacity for straight-up racism in eye color preference. (And since I am mixed like Cerys, I find it bothersome that people are praising one parent’s eye color over the other’s. Yuck!) But sometimes it’s just about liking something rare, or just being drawn to difference. I hear that dark hair and eyes will make you *very* popular in Sweden.
meta.
We have a friend who’s been a white blonde since her hair grew out. She showed up at my daughter’s wedding with her hair matte black (why matte?). I told her she was one of the few natural blondes there. She seemed to have gotten tired of blonde and since she is otherwise blonde, the contrast you speak of might have been the reason.
I don’t see racism there, anyplace.
I remember, when I was a little girl, thinking it was really beautiful and special that I had brown eyes and blonde hair. Both of which were, to my mind, the most beautiful color variant available. I also, to my mind, had just the right shade of skin, “dark” and easily tanning.
Little did I know that the blonde hair was a passing thing of childhood, no more lasting than the blue eyes I was born with (and of course can’t remember having), that the brown eyes were actually, to most people, a less fashionable color than other people’s blue eyes, and that the “dark” skin was only dark by comparison to the extremely fair skin of the WASP side of the family. I do still tend to prefer brown eyes to blue, though, and when I’ve been attracted to someone fair (I’ve been attracted to the gamut in human complexion), it’s generally the light hair more than the light eyes that catches my attention.
On the one hand, of course I don’t think my childishly self-centered assumption that my own shade in everything was prettiest was “racist” (after all, my own shade included brown eyes, which people of all races have). There are all kinds of reasons people prefer one shade or another, from the kind of ordinary liking for yourself that I knew as a child, to love of contrast and vivid colors, etc.
On the other hand, I totally don’t get Richard Aubrey’s determination to say aesthetic preferences have nothing to do with racism, period. Evaluations of beauty do happen in a cultural context, after all. It’s hardly coincidence that, in a white-dominated country, the Miss America contest picked white winners from 1921, and then, post-Civil Rights movement, finally picked a black one in 1984. That beautiful white women get more media play than beautiful women of other races. I don’t think I’m being “so superior I can spot racism where nobody else can find it” when I recognize things like that. Or when I notice that black women, describing their childhood, don’t tend to report having seen themselves (as I did as a child) as self-evidently the complexion that anyone ought to find attractive. Aesthetic preferences are shaped by culture, and part of that culture includes attitudes toward race.
Saying that doesn’t mean that the only reason anyone could find blue eyes or blonde hair attractive is racism. But it does mean that aesthetic preferences aren’t somehow walled off from our other attitudes about race.
Lynn.
Racism is action taken under the doctrine of racialism, which says that some races are inferior and others superior. (You can look it up.)
Preference for the familiar isn’t racism.
As I said earlier, to be “better” means in comparison to some agreed-upon standard and there are none here.
It has been a while since I have read your blog. When I have time, I read it daily, but the last 7 months have been a roller coaster and a combination of work and study is taking up all of my time. Hence, I didn´t know that you (pl) were having a baby. CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!
But what I’m saying, Richard, is that aesthetic preferences for certain colors aren’t simply about liking for the familiar, that they include a range of causes – some racist and some not so much. That, on the one hand, some of what drives our preferences is to some degree a matter of individual imprinting, with no agreed upon standard, and no particular racism to it. And, on the other hand, to some degree it isn’t. Racism, or racialism if you insist, has historically included (and still does include) beliefs about appearance and sexuality as well as beliefs about character, intelligence, and competence. For some people, there is a beauty standard that they think is not merely their taste, and that standard is white. The people who combine comments about Natalia’s beautiful blue eyes with admonitions to her to stay away from her Arab boy friend, or, say, Steve Sailer when he argues that black men are inherently preferentially attracted to white women’s hair because white women’s hair is just inherently more attractive to men than black women’s, aren’t just preferring the familiar, they’re expressing beliefs about which race is better.
Now, obviously, most people (presumably including Hugo’s friends) aren’t Steve Sailer or Natalia’s Arab-hating commenters. But there is a certain history here; go read a group of black women discussing hair if you think there isn’t.
Richard, what exactly do you consider an “agreed-upon standard”? People getting together and signing a declaration of agreement?
What about the Racalicious link I posted about colored contacts, and the fact that no one ever asked for brown-colored contacts and the OP wasn’t even sure that the office stocked them? One commenter says, “I was fairly young and I saw the commercials and asked my parents why it was always a brown-eyed woman who got green or blue or purple contacts, but never a blue-eyed woman getting brown.” Another says, “Back when I remember the commercials, the women in them were olive-skinned with dark hair as well, always going from brown eyes to shocking bright eyes.”
Isn’t there some implicit agreement that brown eyes are not desireable? Advertising goes a long, long way in setting up the “agreed-upon standards” of beauty, and as Lynn says above me, there IS a certain history here.
Yeah. About advertising. I read an article years ago about a hand model. He had the perfect hand to display watches and rings. Not too big, not too small, not too bony and rugged, not too slender, not soft baby hands. The perfect hand to neither add nor subtract from the product.
Funny thing is, can you believe it, there is room for two hand models. The other guy, said the first one, has a square-tipped thumb which people–or at least advertisers–believe is associated with the upper crust.
So the guy in the article, with a round-tipped thumb, does Timex and the other guy does Rolex.
Now, if I ever get to the Hamptons, maybe I’ll start checking out guys’ thumbs. My guess is….nothing startling, and that the advertisers are onto zilch but their own desire to overthink this in order to justify their billings. However, after a certain amount of time, advertising consumers may come to believe it, even if the evidence in the Hamptons does not support it.
So we would have an agreed upon standard which is false. Or, if it is true, not based on race.
It is possible that a physical characteristic is generally associated with one race and not with another. To prefer it is not “racism” because racism is based on racialism–I get tired of saying this–which states that some races are inferior and some superior. To conflate “attractive” with “superior” is about jr. hi. thinking.
Thought about this last night watching our high school’s production of Joseph and The Amazing etc. One narrator was blonde, long, loosely waved hair. The other was brunette, long ponytailed hair. Their voices were excellent, the brunette’s closer to what one would think of as aiming at bel canto, the blonde’s voice a stage voice, good in the upper registers and down and dirty for effect. The blonde’s eyes were more obvious, being contrasted against her hair. For stage purposes, the blonde’s physical characteristics were superior. Is that a racial thing?
Implicit agreement or not, “not desireable” is not the same as “superior”.
The use the accusation of “racism” as a Swiss Army Knife for the control of others’ speech wore out. The memo obviously didn’t get here.
Crap. “not desireable” is not the same as “inferior”.
Blue eyes are less common, and more striking, especially if they occur in someone who would normally not be expected to have blue eyes; people tend to be fascinated with things that appear “exotic” and out of the norm in many cases. They stick out. Since I am heterochromatic (My eyes are different colors) I get this all the time. I’ve a mixed race friend who has blue eyes, and when you see him, it’s just “Wow.” Even after knowing him for a dozen years, I still find my own eyes drawn to his upon encountering him. It’s something so unusual you just have to shake your head. Kind of like my height.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I didn’t know people’s eye color could change naturally.
I wonder what Crystal Gayle would say about this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5JNtxeJLQ4
Once met a guy who was mostly Native American. Had the “ice blue eyes of the northern Celt” as somebody said. Talk about getting your attention. Hard-ass drill sergeant.
I keep hoping to find a fictional character I can describe so.
Blue eyes are less common, and more striking, especially if they occur in someone who would normally not be expected to have blue eyes
Sure, there’s that effect, too. Vanessa Williams and her brother, for instance, have eyes that are all the more striking because you don’t expect to see that color on a black person. On the other hand, I also find Obama’s eyes particularly attractive, so, there are more ways than contrast and unexpected color to get attractive eyes.
Since I am heterochromatic (My eyes are different colors) I get this all the time.
One of my old boy friends was like this; he had different colored eyes and hair that was a particularly striking shade of blonde. (My husband, on the other hand, has exactly the brown eyes you’d expect for his complexion, but is striking and noticeable for his height.)
This is very sad to me. It’s just another example of what people say reveals more about the speaker, than what it does about the person/people who they are talking at. I agree that it shouldn’t matter what color her eyes are to anyone and it’s another example of insensitivity by the speaker, turning it into an opportunity to talk about themselves and their personal preferences. I’ve encountered this behavior all the time and always thought it comes off sounding shallow, petty and trite, whether it is intentional, conscious or not. I think if you asked someone about the origins of their personal preferences and how they were influenced or shaped, alot of people wouldn’t know. Some would say culture, peer group, a few others may realize much of their preferences were instilled in them by their parents. Most people I knew who were given to talking about their personal preferences came off sounding intolerant, insecure and competitive, and mostly inflicted with a bad case of oneupitius–not good traits for relating to others as human beings.