This is often true, but it depends on the context. In Vietnam, darker skin tone is undesirable mainly because it is a marker of low class status: dark-skinned people are presumed to be farmers or laborers who work outdoors and acquire deep tans. It would be difficult to term skin-tone discrimination among Vietnamese “racism”. This is not to say that there are not elements of prejudice against particular dark-skinned minorities, particularly the Cham, which have been incorporated into general skin-tone prejudice. But the primary discriminatory motivation is class-based.

It would be interesting to look at whether the medieval European preference for “fair” skin was related to similar class prejudice, and to what extent such class-coded prejudice against dark skin played a role in the early formation of prejudice against Africans and other dark-skinned peoples.

Not everywhere. You grow up in a country where your main contact with Irish accents is hearing them regularly on the news justifying the latest shopping centre bombing, and it does set up rather a gut reaction.

Believe me, status doesn’t attach to maximal skin fairness. The status configuration for women at least is a tall, slim, blonde, golden-brown-skinned Scandanavian-Polynesian hermaphrodite with big boobs and slim hips. I’m a short, fat, flat-chested, brunette but wondering if there’s any way I can capitalize on being pale—and, at least seasonally, bright pink.

See how easy that would be? So again, what’s stopping you?

Well, then, that settles it. If an anonymous person on the Internet pronounces that he’s smarter than someone else—without ever having made an argument about anything of substance—it’s bound to be true.

You are!

No, functional, I’m not a “simpleton”. Also, I am not “stupid” or “dishonest”. In fact, I am a lot smarter than you!

I have expressly said no fewer than three times that it is NOT the case that “we should be discussing this issue

Great. Let’s stop now then, okay?

And you haven’t offered any defence of why you are so keen we should be discussing this issue rather than the general one.

I have expressly said no fewer than three times that it is NOT the case that “we should be discussing this issue RATHER THAN the general one.” Instead, I have said three times that my additional thought is NOT a major causal factor, and that it’s just one thing that came to mind. Are you really such a simpleton that when I say something three times, you think I’m “keen” to make the opposite point?

Yuuve nyever spoken ta ah fellah wyit a Byelfahst aksenht, then, huvya?

Gyuarantid ta cyut throo glahss, itis.

You are the one being tedious. Your objection is that my one sentence summary of your first comment is not entirely accurate. That is true but it does not affect my point. You were trying to drag the discussion from the general issue – of “invidious discrimination based on skin colour”, if you want to be precise – towards the specific issue of discrimination for which people of minority backgrounds are themselves responsible. That is what I objected to, and would still object to.

And you haven’t offered any defence of why you are so keen we should be discussing this issue rather than the general one. Just endlesss repetitions of your point, denials of claims I never made and various slurs directed at me. If you people to take you seriously I suggest you clean up your act a bit.

Discrimination on the basis of skin tone is quite deserving of the label “racism” in my idiolect. Curiously, even though I readily concede that I intuitively believe my own society of origin to be more racist than American society, I have also experienced a stronger emphasis on skin-tone in American society when it comes to defining similarity between people.

I do not perceive skin-tone as being highly correlated with an immigrant’s ability to navigate the job market competently, and the suggestion strikes me as implausible, but since there is no data, I can only speculate that it is wrong to attribute the discrepancy in salary to this and effectively give substantially more agency to job-seekers than to employers in shaping the job-distribution outcome.

(Isn’t there a study of the hiring practices of orchestras, that found that once the hiring process was blind, women started getting hired significantly more than they used to—this, hilariously after some interviewers gave assurances that they could actually tell the gender of a person just by listening them play an instrument?)

On the other hand, it is quite plausible that people unconsciously discriminate along skin-tone lines in the U.S., just as they do in other countries, and perhaps even more so than in some of those other countries. I certainly detect a stronger emphasis on skin-tone in gauging similarity among people in the US as opposed to my own home country, where facial features are more important. (By way of example, my son is perceived by Americans as looking just like me, and to my eyes and those of my family back in my own country, this is largely due to skin-tone, and decidedly not due to facial features like eye-shape.) Perhaps the history of racial relations in the US sheds a light on this matter.

I distinctly remember when I went to the US Embassy in my home country to get my student visa to come to the US. People on the queue were routinely treated in a demeaning way, but not uniformly so. And my personal experience is that there is a discrepancy in the particular ways in which different cultures associate value to phenotypical characteristics.

I’m quite certain that racism is still a problem in the US (less of a problem than it was a generation ago, but still a problem)—but this study ISN’T about “racism”, since one of the factors controlled for was race (as defined by white men, admittedly). So I’m trying to think of plausible reasons that light-skinned Mexicans would have higher earnings in the US than dark-skinned Mexicans; I’m perfectly happy to grant that all else equal, Mexicans have lower earnings than white USA Americans, and that this is probably due in part to racism—but that isn’t what this study is about.