Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Blinded by colour

WHERE MONEY TALKS

Millions of Asians and Africans will sympathise with Oprah Winfrey's fulmination against the Hermes shop in Paris because they are victims not of prejudice but of tantalising uncertainty.

Richard Baldwin, the African-American writer, best expressed the predicament when he lamented that he would never know whether the elevator attendant was genuinely busy or had kept him waiting because he was black.

Colour prejudice is an unfashionable theme nowadays. The feeling has grown that even talking about it somehow sanctions discrimination. When a Caucasian "" note my care in avoiding saying "white" which, in any case, means a mottled pink and grey "" mentions the subject, he is denounced as racist.

When someone with a darker skin "" tear me from limb to limb but nothing so politically incorrect as "coloured" shall pass my lips "" does so, it is assumed that either he suffers from an inferiority complex or is an inverted snob.

In private, people are sometimes candid to the point of exposing secret fantasies. Fifty years after being wed in New York, an elderly Chinese Singaporean couple still can't understand why the marriage registrar was surprised when they entered "white" in the then mandatory column for colour. "What else could I write?" asked the puzzled bride, now a distinguished grande dame.

She would have been outraged if I had said that the New Yorker would undoubtedly have described her and her betrothed as "yellow". Her conviction of being white was as deep-seated as that of Jagat Singh Thind, a Sikh who migrated to the US in 1913, served with the American forces in World War I, and made history by claiming citizenship "" then reserved for Caucasians "" by arguing that as "a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race", he was "white".

This is India's national obsession, witness the flood of matrimonial ads for "fair" or "wheat-complexioned" brides. A dark-skinned girl is a liability on the marriage mart, even when garbed in the euphemism of "ujjal shyam varna," Bengali for "bright colour of the evening". The word "varna" meaning colour, is the term for the Hindu caste system, making it the world's oldest colour bar.

Not all Indians delude themselves. One, a rich businessman, confessed recently that not being born European was "drawing a consolation prize in the lottery of life." India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru also noted that Britain's pecking order placed whites from the old dominions after the British, followed by Anglo-Saxon Americans ("not dagoes, wops, and so on"), western Europeans, other Europeans, Latin South Americans and, after a long gap, "the brown, yellow and black races of Asia and Africa, all bunched up more or less together."

Evelyn Waugh's delightful novel, Scoop, about reporting the civil war in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, confirms that colour is often a matter of perception. No one knows the difference between Ethiopia's warring Patriots and Traitors, Reds and Blacks.

"You see they are all Negroes," the British editor tells his reporter. "And the Fascists won't be called Black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolshevists want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say Black you mean Red, and when you mean Red you say White, and when the party who call themselves Blacks say Traitors they mean what we call Blacks ..."

But, as Oprah might tell Hermes, apartheid South Africa treated Japanese businessmen as "honorary white" because perception is governed by self-interest. More pertinently, she can cite Harrods owner Mohammed Al Fayed opening the London store for Michael Jackson to squander over £1 million on trinkets in a midnight shopping spree.

Of course, Al Fayed is Egyptian born and Jackson whiter than white. But like Oprah, they intersect at the point where money or rank cancels colour. In a 1950s cause celebre, the restaurant manager at Houston airport showed the Indian ambassador to a private room. First she argued that blacks couldn't be served in public; then, learning the diner's status, she shot back that she had recognised him at once for a VIP who deserved separate facilities.

It's Baldwin's uncertainty again.