Race and Skin Colour

This paper presents a deep learning approach for age estimation of human beings using their facial images. The different racial groups based on skin colour have been incorporated in the annotations of the images in the dataset, while ensuring an adequate distribution of subjects across the racial groups so as to achieve an accurate Automatic Facial Age Estimation (AFAE). The principle of transfer learning is applied to the ResNet50 Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) initially pretrained for the task of object classification and finetuning it’s hyperparameters to propose an AFAE system that can be used to automate ages of humans across multiple racial groups. The mean absolute error of 4.25 years is obtained at the end of the research which proved the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

Race and Racism in Modern East Asia juxtaposes Western racial constructions of East Asians with constructions of race and their outcomes in modern East Asia. It is the first endeavor to explicitly and coherently link constructions of race and racism in both regions. These constructions have not only played a decisive role in shaping the relations between the West and East Asia since the mid nineteenth century, but also exert substantial influence on current relations and mutual images in both the East-West nexus and East Asia. Written by some of the field's leading authorities, this groundbreaking 21-chapter volume offers an analysis of these constructions, their evolution and their interrelations.


REVIEWS
"In the field of race studies, race and racism in East Asia has generally been little explored. These two books [Michael Keevak’s Becoming Yellow as well] each works to address that gap in scholarship. As a pair they go a long ways toward furthering our understanding of the historical, political, and social significance of the role of race in East Asia. Most significantly, these books help us to understand how prominent a factor race was in armed conflicts in twentieth-century East Asia. The volume is divided into two parts. Part One deals with Western conceptions of East Asians. Part Two, fully half of the volume, deals with questions of race and racism from perspectives located within East Asia, whether China, Korea, or Japan. The format of an edited volume allows for a large scope of overall inquiry as well as a significant degree of specificity within individual essay. …The juxtaposition of essays in Part One brings to light a number of important topics for reflection and future research, not least the large and thorny question of just how inextricably intertwined the connections between racism and rear of decline actually are. … Part two “East Asia Race Theories, Racial Policies and Racism” breaks new ground in the field of race studies in that it is devoted to race from entirely East Asian perspectives (and there are many!)."
— Laura Hostetler, Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 37 (2015): 74-84.

"Within the historical research on the topic of racism, East Asia has barely played any role. This volume, the outcome of a multi-year project closes this research lacuna. ... Overall, the volume is superbly edited and easy to read and will undoubtedly remain, until further notice, the standard work on the subject of race in East Asia. For those interested in the historical development of the concept of race and wish to go beyond the European framework, this volume is highly recommended."
— Sven Saaler, Historische Zeitschrift (2014)

"A gigantic volume, its real strong point is its variety, with papers probing such interesting and understudied topics ... The scholarly summaries are very accomplished and provide a wealth of material for understanding that race is neither a fixed nor an atemporal construct, nor is it one that can be simply transferred from Western contexts into Eastern ones. ... The essays represent starting points for a variety of new work as such they are very valuable contributions to the burgeoning field. Highly recommended."
— Michael Keevak, Asian Ethnicity (2014)

"This collection of scholarly works explores racial constructions of East Asians from both external and internal perspectives. ... Not only does this book help readers understand how racial constructions of the West and East Asia interacted in shaping their relationships in the past, but also, more importantly, how these constructions still influence their current relationships in the 21st century. Summing up: Recommended. All levels/libraries."
— A.Y. Lee, Choice, 2013


TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Tables
Conventions
Preface

1. Modern East Asia and the Rise of Racial Thought: Possible Links, Unique Features, and Unsettled Issues
Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel

PART I: WESTERN RACE THEORIES, RACIAL IMAGES AND RACISM
2. Early Modern European Divisions of Mankind and East Asians, 1500-1750 50
Walter Demel and Rotem Kowner
3. How the “Mongoloid Race” Came into Being: Late Eighteenth-Century Constructions of East Asians in Europe
Walter Demel
4. Between Contempt and Fear: Western Racial Constructions of East Asians since 1800
Rotem Kowner
5. “A Very Great Gulf”: Late Victorian British Diplomacy and Race in East Asia
T.G. Otte
6. Pan-Mongolians at Twilight: East Asia and Race in Russian Modernism, 1890-1921
Susanna Soojung Lim
7. National Identity and Race in Post-Revolutionary Russia: Pil’niak’s Travelogues from Japan and China
Alexander Bukh
8. Class, Race, Floating Signifier: American Media Imagine the Chinese, 1870-1900
Lenore Metrick-Chen
9. Racism for Beginners: Constructions of Chinese in Twentieth Century Belgian Comics
Idesbald Goddeeris
10. Race, Imperialism, and Reconstructing Selves: Late Nineteenth Century Korea in European Travel Literature
Huajeong Seok
11. Race, Culture and the Reaction to the Japanese Victory of 1905 in the English-Speaking World
Philip Towle

PART II: EAST ASIAN RACE THEORIES, RACIAL POLICIES AND RACISM
12. A Certain Whiteness of Being: Chinese Perceptions of Self by the Beginning of European Contact
Don J. Wyatt
13. Racial Discourse and Utopian Visions in Nineteenth Century China
Sufen Sophia Lai
14. The Discourse of Race in Twentieth-Century China
Frank Dikötter
15. Racist South Korea? Diverse but not Tolerant of Diversity
Gi-Wook Shin
16. Skin Color Melancholy in Modern Japan: Male Elites' Racial Experiences Abroad, 1880s-1950s
Ayu Majima
17. Anatomically Speaking: The Kubo Incident and the Paradox of Race in Colonial Korea
Hoi-eun Kim
18. Who Classified Whom, and for What Purpose? The “Japanese” in Northeast China in the Age of Empire
Mariko Asano Tamanoi
19. Race and International Law in Japan’s New Order in East Asia, 1938-1945
Urs Matthias Zachmann
20. East Asia’s “Melting-Pot”: Reevaluating Race Relations in Japan’s Colonial Empire 583
Yukiko Koshiro
21. Categorical Confusion: President Obama as a Case Study of Racialized Practices in Contemporary Japan
Christine R. Yano

Contributors
Bibliography
Index

This book examines colourism (the process of discrimination based on skin colour among people of the same ethnicity), from a historical and political perspective and highlights how religion and slavery both contributed towards the spread of colourism throughout the African Diaspora. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book traces the origins of colourism and how it evolved in the UK, USA Jamaica and Latin America. It should appeal to anyone with an interest in race and identity.

This paper explores beauty ideals prevalent among young women in Chennai, India. It is part of a larger project that contributes to the emerging scholarship around women's experiences in the rapidly changing landscape of urban India, with a focus on young female rural to urban migrants living in the city of Chennai (their destination). Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study of women living in hostel accommodation conducted in 2015 and 2016, I consider the talk, observations, and beauty practices of the research participants. In particular, I explore the ways in which 'lighter' skin colour is privileged as more desirable and how participants both reproduce and contest this construction. The discussion here delves into the obsessive aspiration for lighter skin, its gendered dimensions, and its reflection in online spaces.

Este trabajo forma parte de una investigación más amplia sobre la
relación del candombe (afrouruguayo y recreaciones de candombe
“afrolitoraleño”) con los procesos identitarios de sus practicantes del
Litoral argentino. En esta oportunidad me propongo indagar en un punto
señalado por algunos de ellos: su percepción del propio color de piel
“oscuro”. A partir de aquí pondré en relación el señalamiento que ellos
hacen de este rasgo corporal, y su inmersión en el candombe
afrouruguayo como práctica cultural asociada históricamente a la
presencia “negra” en el Rio de la Plata. En un país que hizo de la
blanquitud y la europeidad de su población su mito fundacional más
persistente, el propósito es comprender como diferentes modalidades de apropiación del mismo van produciendo entre los practicantes del Litoral argentino identificaciones/desidentificaciones con diferentes categorías de negritud. Finalmente trabajaré un caso de identificación que se produce cuando a través del señalamiento del propio color de piel “oscuro” incorporan “lo negro” a memorias familiares “blanqueadas”.

Government-aided vernacular schools introduced " human physiology " as a subject in 1859. I use the first couple of schoolbooks and the debate running up to the introduction of the subject to open up the particular and specific histories through which modern anatomo-physiological knowledge was vernacularized in colonial Bengal. In so doing I have two interconnected goals in this article. My first goal is to analyze the precocious decision to teach human physiology to colonial schoolboys, at a time when this was the norm neither in Great Britain nor indeed in traditional Bengali schools. My second goal is to use this case to further develop "vernacularization" as a conceptual tool. In pursuing these twin objectives, I simultaneously hope to move the debate on modern anatomo-physiological knowledge in South Asia away from the level of epistemic superiority and onto-politics to the level of concrete historical particularities.

Until recently, due to a light-skin bias embedded in colour film stock emulsions and digital camera design, the rendering of non-Caucasian skin tones was highly deficient and required the development of compensatory practices and technology improvements to redress its shortcomings. Using the emblem-atic " Shirley " norm reference card as a central metaphor reflecting the changing state of race relations/aesthetics, this essay analytically traces the colour adjustment processes in the industries of visual representation and identifies some pro-totypical changes in the field. The author contextualizes the history of these changes using three theoretical categories: the 'technological unconscious' (Vaccari, 1981), 'dysconsciousness' (King, 2001), and an original concept of 'cognitive equity,' which is proposed as an intelligent strategy for creating and promoting equity by inscribing a wider dynamic range of skin tones into image technologies, products...

Abel, Sarah. ‘Lo que los ojos no alcanzan a ver: genómica, color, y cuotas “raciales” en Brasil’. In Educaciones y racismos. Casos y reflexiones, edited by Saúl Velasco Cruz, María de los Ángeles Gómez Gallegos, and Diego Francisco Morales Esquivel, 280–316. Colotlán: Universidad de Guadalajara, Centro Universitario del Norte, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 2021.
http://www.cunorte.udg.mx/investigacion/publicaciones/educaciones-y-racismos-reflexiones-y-casos

Read full article here: https://rdcu.be/b3Rex 
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Although much attention has already been paid to Kant’s ideas on race, more research is needed to determine the sources that he used to support his portrayal of non-white races. A comprehension of the intellectual context gives us the opportunity to see the way in which Kant wished to contribute to discussions on inheritable human characteristics and the inferiority of certain races. This article will emphasize the relevance of the views of Joseph Priestley and Alexander Wilson for Kant’s hypothesis on the relation between phlogiston and the black race. This allows us to comprehend the methodology that Kant prescribed for natural history and its consequences for his understanding of the inferiority of the black race.

This essay focuses on Binney and Smith's creation and marketing of Crayola fleshtone art products from the late 1950s until the mid-1990s, analyzing the company's shifting nomenclature-from " flesh " to " peach " to its multicultural collection. After reflecting on the significance of Crayola's color adjustment for children's sociocultural and aesthetic development and for teacher's pedagogical repertoires around diversity issues, I introduce an original notion-cognitive equity. I propose this as a refined way of understanding racial and cultural equity issues that don't just revolve around statistics and access to institutions, but also inscribes a new normative vision of skin color equity directly into technologies, products, and body representations in a range of visual media. At the very early stage of children's cognitive development when stereotypes and racisms are being formed, this would be a particularly intelligent design strategy in which to reinforce multiculturalism and multiracialism in all aspects of their visual culture and the commodities that are available to them. The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives. (Margaret Visser, 1986) This article is about why skin color matters in technologies, objects, and images designated for children. My central argument will demonstrate why a dynamic range or a continuum of colors from light beiges and pinks to dark browns should become the new norm for skin colors that are embedded in visual technologies (such as digital cameras, film chemistry, crayons), images, and products that reflect or depict some notion of skin color. I shall argue that it is not enough to explicitly teach children antiracist values in schools and at home. These values must be reflected in the commodities, images, and media that surround kids as reminders. My empirical research and conceptual work on this issue are emergent from a broader series of case studies that I have been undertaking for

Based on extensive, original sociological and anthropological data generated by PERLA, this landmark study analyzes ethnoracial classification, inequality, and discrimination, as well as public opinion about Afro-descended and indigenous social movements and policies that foster greater social inclusiveness, all set within an ethnoracial history of each country. A once-in-a-generation examination of contemporary ethnicity, this book promises to contribute in significant ways to policymaking and public opinion in Latin America.

This paper presents a deep learning approach for age estimation of
human beings using their facial images. The different racial
groups based on skin colour have been incorporated in the
annotations of the images in the dataset, while ensuring an
adequate distribution of subjects across the racial groups so as to
achieve an accurate Automatic Facial Age Estimation (AFAE).
The principle of transfer learning is applied to the ResNet50
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) initially pretrained for the
task of object classification and finetuning it’s hyperparameters to
propose an AFAE system that can be used to automate ages of
humans across multiple racial groups. The mean absolute error of
4.25 years is obtained at the end of the research which proved the
effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.