Do you prefer your skin to be tanned or bleached?

If you’re white, like me, this question sounds absurd. Why would I bleach my skin to make it lighter or more fair?

If you’re not white, possibly Filipino, this question may sound equally absurd, but for a different reason, one rooted deeply in your culture. So deeply that it may be difficult to completely shed its effects in your daily life. Especially if you’re a woman.

I had never considered the distinction between tanned and bleached skin until talking with a neighbor who’s from the Philippines. There, lighter skin is not only favored but aggressively promoted on multiple fronts with special soaps, pills, lotions, injections and routine bleaching treatments. This mass conditioning is conducted through media outlets, magazines, social media, Filipino celebrities, and beauty products, as well as long-standing cultural norms that promote lighter skin tones.

“In my country, fair skin is beautiful. White is beautiful,” my neighbor explained.

She is not at all dark, though she feels she is. In her youth, she felt a sense of shame and inferiority about her skin tone, falling victim to the “white is beautiful” social conditioning in her homeland. This skin-based caste system is the very description of “beauty,” indoctrinated centuries ago into the Filipino lifestyle by dominant colonialism from other countries, mostly Spain and the U.S.

You can go back even further in history to discover other discriminatory shades of colorism, when having darker skin is associated with racism, oppression and cultural inferiority.

“I’m finally getting out of that mindset,” my neighbor told me.

It’s been 15 years since she emigrated to the United States.

“I still tend to avoid sun exposure so it doesn’t darken my skin,” she said as we sat under the shade of a tree in my backyard.

She habitually stays out of the sun’s glare whenever possible. She tends to venture outdoors at dusk to do lawn work and to avoid the sun’s harshest rays during the day. She used to carry an umbrella with her every day. Not in case it rains but in case the sun is out.

“All day, every day in the Philippines,” she said. “It’s so hot there that most people don’t go outside unless we have to. And when we go to the beach, we run into the water and then run back to our umbrellas or shelters to avoid the sun.”

This avoidance of the sun isn’t true for all Filipinos, of course, yet it’s true for enough Filipinos that it has become a cultural norm, based on perception, not reality. It’s also common in many other countries with people who have naturally darker skin tones.

“I’m loving my natural skin tone more than I ever have, thanks to my husband, who’s white and who was born in this country,” my neighbor said.

As a middle-aged white man, I’ve had a completely different experience with skin color and sun exposure. I love being outdoors as much as possible. I bathe in the sunshine for recreation. I enjoy having a summertime tan. My Filipino neighbor jokes with me that I must be crazy to subject myself to the sun’s wrath on a regular basis.

She has a valid point. My deepest concern is about skin damage or skin cancer, not about darker skin that is less attractive or not approved by society.

Not once do I worry that my tanned skin will be construed as a social descriptor. Not once have I considered this sort of social status is based on inherent prejudices about a darker-skinned descriptor.

Since my youth, getting a tan has always been a cool thing. Period. There was no reason to overthink it, only to think about using sunscreen to not get burned.

In the Philippines and many other countries inhabited by darker-skinned people, their culture has been burned by lily-white dominance that continues today. Not with the shackles of slavery and cruelty, but with the shackles of public brainwashing about skin tone and “white is beautiful.”

This obviously happens in our country, too, as the Black community knows painfully well. Aspects of critical race theory — a controversial term these days — are ingrained so deeply into our social mechanisms that it often appears invisible — that is, if you’re white. Not so much, however, if your skin tone is permanently dark, not temporarily tanned.

“Imagine if there were no borders in the world,” my Filipino neighbor suggested. “There would be more interracial relationships and skin color wouldn’t matter as much.”

I told her that she sounded like a John Lennon song. She laughed. We laughed.

Nonetheless, the sensitive subject of skin bleaching to appear more white remains a taboo topic in Filipino culture. Not everyone feels comfortable talking about it, I’m told. I appreciated that my neighbor shared her experience with me, knowing what I do for a living. I plan to thank her again the next time I see her outside her home.

At dusk.

jdavich@post-trib.com