Have fair-skinned peoples ever been the lower/oppressed class?

Question

In many societies around the globe today we see that the darker skinned peoples are generally of a lower social status than the fair skinned peoples of the same area, or that fair skin is considered preferable to dark skin. Even in India today women are marketed skin-lightening creams.

However, has there even been society in which the fairer skinned peoples were either of a lower social standing than the dark-skinned people, or where darker skin was preferable to fair skin? I am aware of the phenomenon of sun-bathing to darken the skin, but so far as I know this is not used to convey the image of increased social status as the skin-lightening creams are, but rather used to convey the image of one who has an outdoor lifestyle or has "lazy time" to spend in the sun.

Answer 1

The Roman Empire routinely enslaved fair skinned Germans and Celts, and referred to those people derogatively as barbarians.

Pretty much all the ancient Mediterranean and Near East empires including Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc. practiced slavery, and like the Romans might also have drawn from more northerly, fairer skinned peoples.

However, we should be careful drawing too broad of comparisons. Slavery worked differently in different cultures. As bloodthirsty as the Roman Empire was, they actually had certain laws protecting slaves, that simply did not exist for slaves in the United States. In the Roman Empire, slavery was much more of a class-based institution; anyone could become a slave potentially - your excess children, prisoners of war, and debtors could all be sold into slavery. So, while the Romans did enslave Germans and Celts, it wasn't race-based as happened in the Americas; the Romans were pretty much an equal opportunity enslavement empire.

Anyway, slavery has been rife throughout history. It's hard to find any culture that didn't enslave others in some form or other, and that hadn't existed as slaves for someone else. It's just one of those nasty things humans do to each other until they learn better; there's nothing fundamentally inherent about skin color in any of this. It's just the random quirks of history and geography why things turned out one way rather than another.

Answer 2

The Ainu people come to mind, an ethnic minority in Japan.

Wikipedia says "Full-blooded Ainu are lighter skinned than their Japanese neighbors", and talks about "the long history of the oppression of the Ainu people by Japan's majority".

Answer 3

Oppression is all about political power, so really its just a matter of one group conquering another. Which of the two groups happens to do the conquering is just a matter of historical luck.

One good example of a darker-skinned group happening to do the conquering is the ancient civilization of Kush. The Kushites were a Nubian people, speaking a Nilo-Saharan language. Melanin doesn't preserve well in archeology, but modern speakers of these languages are about as dark-skinned as human beings come.

The Kushites certianly did their time as Egptian vassals themselves. However, sometime around 727 BCE they invaded Egypt, starting an 80 year period where they ruled the country as the 25th Dynasty.

Maximum extent of Kush in 700 BC

Answer 4

I'm quite sure white people have been the target for lynch mobs and even ethnic cleansing in certain African nations. Zimbabwe and Uganda comes to mind, but I am quite certain white people are looked down on in many places in Africa, mostly due to a history of imperialism.

(Sadly, I don't have time to find sources right now).

Answer 5

The Barbary Pirates raided as far north as Iceland and Scotland to capture slaves. While still Caucasian, North Africans typically have darker skin than northern Europeans.

Answer 6

When the Moors conquered and ruled Spain, most Spanish were lighter-skinned than the ruling Moors. Moors denied education, at least to Christian Spaniards, in the part of the country they controlled, and Granada was considered "too beautiful for Christian eyes."

Also, the Mongols conquered and oppressed large parts of the former Soviet Union (especially the Ukraine), whose people were lighter-skinned than them.

Answer 7

In 1627 a Turkish pirate ship attacked Icelandic coastal villages. Hundreds of people were killed and 300 more were taken hostage and sold as slaves in Africa. A priest from the Westman islands(a group of small islands in Iceland's south) was amongst them, he managed to escape from Algiers, through Italy, France, Holland and then to Denmark from where he got back to Iceland. He wrote down his memoirs in a book called Reisubok, which quite accurately describes his journey.

Sources:
Reisubok: http://reisubok.net/Home/default.aspx,
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Abductions

Answer 8

Wikipedia documents the present day persecution of people with albinism in parts of East Africa.

Answer 9

Ethnically differentiated rulers regularly reduce the status of the majority population, and often these peoples are constructed as racially identical in terms of late 19th century racial theories. See the Norman dominance over a predominantly Anglo-Saxon population in England for an example. (Here comes the new lord, slightly more Frenchified than the old lord).

For an example that uses the racial constructs from the 19th century exactly, wouldn't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27#The_age_of_Tatar_rule match your interests? Obviously neither the population of Rus nor the Mongols perceived of themselves in terms of 19th century racial categories.

Finally, societies that are perceived to be largely ethnically homogeneous regularly reduce the status of their own members, see the tribal crises of antiquity, or the regular internal subjugation of peasants into serfs, or the vast emiseration of the English working class during the period 1750 to 1850. This is class war as usual.

Answer 10

The Catholic/Nationalist community in Northern Ireland was socially opressed by the dominate Protestand/Loyalist community for a lot of the 20th century. Both were white.