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Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters, edited by Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 299pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780804759991.
Evelyn Nakano Glenn has skillfully brought together fourteen essays that explore the salience of colorism around the world. These multidisciplinary and transnational works provide an intersectional analysis of the political economy of skin shade. Read together, these treatises inform the reader not only of the significance of skin color in a variety of settings, but also how these locales relate to one another, and the material consequences of these relationships. Moreover, these contributions make clear the conceptual distinction between race and color and between whiteness and lightness, two often under-theorized distinctions.
Several chapters make a convincing case for the need for more extensive national-level survey data on color in the United States. Edward Telles shows that, in the United States, whites earn, on average, the most, followed by lighter-skinned blacks, with very dark-skinned blacks earning the least. Similarly, Verna Keith found that lighter-skinned African Americans have advantages over their darker-skinned counterparts in earnings, education and occupations. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David R. Dietrich contend that a pigmentocracy is emerging in the United States, where people are accorded different social statuses, according to their skin color. These authors point out that many of their claims are tentative because of the need for...