Mixed Race Studies

Melungeon DNA Study Reveals Ancestry, Upsets ‘A Whole Lot Of People’

The Associated Press
2012-05-24

Travis Loller

Jack Goins poses with a photo dated to have been taken in 1898 of his step-great-great grandfather George Washington Goins, who died in 1817, left, and great-great grandmother, Susan Minor-Goins who died in 1813 at the Hawkins County Archives Project building Wednesday, May 23, 2012 in Rogersville, Tenn. Goins is of Melungeon descent and has researched Melungeon history for around 40 years. A new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy found that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin. (AP Photo/Wade Payne)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies.

Now a new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.

And that report, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal, doesn’t sit comfortably with some people who claim Melungeon ancestry.

“There were a whole lot of people upset by this study,” lead researcher Roberta Estes said. “They just knew they were Portuguese, or Native American.”…

…In recent decades, interest in the origin of the Melungeons has risen dramatically with advances both in DNA research and in the advent of Internet resources that allow individuals to trace their ancestry without digging through dusty archives.

G. Reginald Daniel, a sociologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara who’s spent more than 30 years examining multiracial people in the U.S. and wasn’t part of this research, said the study is more evidence that race-mixing in the U.S. isn’t a new phenomenon.

“All of us are multiracial,” he said. “It is recapturing a more authentic U.S. history.”

Estes and her fellow researchers theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s, before slavery…

Read the entire story here.

The Hypocrisy of the “Pigmentocracy”

Trotter Review
Volume 7, Issue 2 (1993) A Special Issue on the Political and Social Relations Between Communities of Color
Article 9
4 pages

Lucas Rivera
The City Sun

The following article is excerpted and reprinted with permission of the author and was originally published in two parts in the May 12—18 and 19—25 issues of The City Sun.

The question of race and skin color has haunted both the Latino and black communities, with far too many denying any ties to African ancestry—despite darker skin tones. But the choice many Latinos face—as to whether they should call themselves black or white—may be feeding into the hands of strategists, who may be making economic determinations based on the number of people of color.

The choice and how it impacts on society has befuddled the minds of many social researchers and is not unlike the problem of color that blacks in America confront. “My sense is that it hasn’t changed much,” explained Dr. Samuel Betances, a sociology professor at Chicago University who wrote a manifesto on the “Prejudice of Not Having Prejudice.”

“Puerto Ricans and Latinos have a fear of admitting that they are racially mixed. We don’t want to admit we are part of an African legacy. If you ask a Puerto Rican how he would describe himself, as black or white, he would claim he had Indian blood,” Betances said…

…A Drop of White Blood in Latin America Classifies One as White

Jordan claimed that in Latin America and the Caribbean, the racial parody worked in reverse. “Part of the problem is misunderstanding,” he said. “Racial definitions in Latin America versus the United States are different, in the United States, if you have a drop of black blood, you’re black. in Latin America. if you have a drop of white blood, you’re defined as white, which is often referred to as the blancamiento, meaning ‘whitening.’ Jordan further asserted that “these two definitions clash because when people from Latin America come here, they operate under the rules of Latin America. So people clash because they see racial identifications differently through a prism. The other part is exacerbated by racism within the Latino community. Whereas Latinos pretend there’s no racism in our culture.”…

Read the entire article here.

Black Indian Slave Narratives

John F. Blair, Publisher
2004
200 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-89587-298-2

Patrick Minges

Few people realize that Native Americans were enslaved right alongside the African Americans in this country. Fewer still realize that many Native Americans owned African Americans and Native Americans from other tribes. Recently, historians have determined that of the 2,193 interviews with former slaves that were collected by the Federal Writers’ Project, 12 percent contain some reference to the interviewees’ being related to or descended from Native Americans. In addition, many of the interviewees make references to their Native American owners. In Black Indian Slave Narratives, Patrick Minges offers the most absorbing of these firsthand testimonies about African American and Native American relationships in the 19th century.

The selections include an interview with Felix Lindsey, who was born in Kentucky of Mvskoke/African heritage and who served as one of the buffalo soldiers who rounded up Geronimo. Chaney Mack, whose father was a “full-blood African” from Liberia and whose mother was a “pure-blood Indian,” gives an in-depth look at both sides of her cultural heritage, including her mother’s visions based on the “night the stars fell” over Alabama. There are stories of Native Americans taken by “nigger stealers,” who found themselves placed on slave-auction blocks alongside their African counterparts.

The narratives in this collection provide insight into the lives of people who lived in complex and dynamically interconnected cultures. The interviews also offer historical details of capture and enslavement, life in the Old South and the Old West, Indian removal, and slavery in the Indian territory.

I wasn’t as dark as I am now, but kind of red-like, and when Geronimo saw me he said, “You ain’t no nigger, you’re an Indian.”

“My father may have been an Indian, but I’m a nigger because that’s the race of my mother, and the race I chose,” I said.

—From Felix Lindsey’s narrative

(ANT/NAS 493): Mixed Blood: Looking at the Relationship Between Africans and Native Americans

Creighton University
Omaha, Nebraska
Fall 2005

Rev. Raymond A. Bucko, S.J., Professor of Anthropology

In this course the relationship between Africans and Native Americans will be explored.  “Africans and Native Americans worked as slaves and as free men together.  Both groups played important role in the shaping of the history of this country and the relationships that had are often overlooked and unknown.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn and understand the complex relationships between Africans and Native Americans.
2. Examine pre and post-Civil War African and Native relationship.

Texts:

• Katz, William Loren. Black Indians A Hidden Heritage. New York: Anthneum Books for young Readers, 1986.
• Minges, Patrick. Black Indian Slave Narratives. John F. Blair Publisher, 2004.
• Porter, Kenneth W. The Black Indians. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 1996.

For more information, click here.

The Vanishing American Negro

The American Mercury
Volume LXIV, Number 278 (February 1947)
pages 133-139

Ralph Linton (1893-1953), Professor of Anthropolgy
Yale University

In the question period following any talk on minority problems, someone invariably brings up the query, “What do anthropologists consider to be the long range solution of the Negro problem?” Though I usually avoid this point when I can, I sometimes have to reply that most anthropologists agree there will be no Negro problem in another two hundred years; by then there will not be enough recognizable Negroes left in this country to constitute a problem.

When a New York newspaper headlined this statement in reporting a lecture, the main body of which did not deal with this subject, I found myself quoted with indignation in both the white and Negro press. But I was not disturbed by these repercussions until I was misquoted, and with approval, by Senator Bilbo, who said in a campaign speech:

Dr. Linton . . . stated a few weeks ago that if the present rate of intermingling, intermarriage and interbreeding of whites and blacks in this country goes on . . . within nine generations we will have no whites and no blacks . . . only yellow. … I had rather see my race destroyed by the noted atomic bomb than to see it gradually destroyed by mongrelization of the white and black races.

This convinced me that some amplification and clarification of my statement was necessary.

The prophecy of the ultimate disappearance of the American Negro in the United States is based on three facts. First, while the number of Negroes has been steadily increasing since 1790, when the first Negro census was taken, the white population has increased so much more rapidly that the over-all proportion of Negroes to whites is steadily declining. Second, the Negro is no longer concentrated in the South but is redistributing himself more evenly over the entire country. Third, and most important, the American Negro is steadily becoming lighter…

…But the main reason for believing that the Negro will disappear as a distinct American minority is that the Negro population is becoming lighter with each successive generation. This is not a matter of paling out in a northern climate — it takes thousands ofyears to evolve a new biological type—but of steady infiltration of white blood into the Negro group…

…Miscegenation has been going on since the Negroes first arrived in America. While most of the slaves imported were black Forest Negroes from West Africa, there were also a considerable number from the West Indies, where some race mixture had already taken place. At the beginning of the slave-trade era there were still many Indians in the Southeast, and considerable interbreeding took place between Indians and slaves. Runaway slaves frequently took refuge in the Indian camps, where they were protected and frequently adopted into the tribe. Indian genes began to take the kink out of Negro hair and to thin Negro lips…

Read the entire article here.

Is the American Negro Becoming Lighter? An Analysis of the Sociological and Biological Trends

American Sociological Review
Volume 13, Number 4 (August, 1948)
pages 437-443

William M. Kephart, Professor of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

There is a belief in some quarters that there is a biological solution to the Negro problem; that is, in due course of time there will be no Negro problem because there will be no Negroes. They will have gradually become lighter and lighter, by virtue of the infusion of white blood, and by the preferential mating among Negroes themselves (wherein the light-skinned Ne- groes are the preferred mates), and finally will have disappeared as a minority group. This paper is an attempt to refute this theory, and in addition, perhaps, to bring up to date some of the findings on the Negro skin color.

In a recent article entitled “The Vanishing American Negro,” Ralph Linton maintains that in 200 years the American Negro will have disappeared as a minority group. Dr. Linton bases his assumption on several hypotheses. First, it is maintained that so far as total population is concerned, the overall proportion of Negroes to whites is steadily declining.

This statement needs some amplification. From 1790, when the first census was taken, until fairly recently, it is true that the proportion of Negroes in the total population declined. In 1790, 19.3 per cent of the United States population was Negro, while by 1930 this figure had been virtually halved to 9.7 per cent. This comparative diminution was due not only to a smaller net reproduction rate on the part of the Negro as compared to the white, but also to immigration. Thompson estimates that 38,000,000 immigrants entered the United States between 1820 and 1930, and (he number of Negroes included was negligible. (Since 1808, when African slave importation was prohibited by law, the number of Negroes entering the country has been extremely small.)

By 1930, however, the immigration picture had changed, and by 1940 the effects of this change could be seen in the Negro-White Census figures…

The Origins of Mixed Race Populations

New African
January 2005

Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

While rape played a huge part in the origins of Africa and the Diaspora’s mixed race populations, it is wrong to attribute it all to rape, argues Carina Ray.

In the February 2004 issue of New African, the columnist Stella Orakwue threw the covers off one of the European empire’s dirtiest secrets–the widespread rape of black women by white men. Her expose, headlined “History’s Most Sordid Cover-Up” went on to declare that the historical origins of mixed race populations in Europe’s former colonies in North and South America, the Caribbean and Africa are located in this silenced history of rape.

In the following months, Orakwue’s pronouncement drew a lively response from several New African readers. Yet, each piece of writing in the thread left me with a distinct sense that the discussion had taken a wrong turn—or gotten off on the wrong foot to begin with, sweeping historical claims, such as the one made by Orakwue, are bound to be both true and false. Exceptions to the rule aside, her argument is valid for North America, particularly in the South during the era of slavery and to a decreasing extent through the period of Jim Crow segregation.

The origins of mixed race populations in South America and the Caribbean, however, fit less neatly into a single pattern of explanation. This should not be taken as a denial of the partial role that rape played in the development of mixed race populations in these regions, but to identify it as the predominant causal factor obscures the complicated history of race mixing in these areas.

Many countries in South America and the Caribbean are home to populations that are almost entirely mixed. Their numbers cannot be accounted for primarily by rape, but rather result in large part from complex patterns of inter-marriage, concubinage and consensual sex between indigenous peoples, Africans, Europeans and multi-racial people themselves. With respect to Europe’s former African colonies, the link between rape and the origins of mixed race people is strongest, although by no means definitive, in the settler colonies of Southern Africa, where rape often formed part of a regime of white domination. It also functioned in areas like the Cape Colony, in modern-day South Africa, as a violent form of slave labour reproduction, not unlike the American South during slavery. The paradigm of rape, however, is far less adequate for explaining the historical origins of mixed race people in other parts of Africa…

…One need only look at the lineage of many of Ghana’s Afro-European families, like the Bannerman, Brew, Wulff-Cochrane, Reindorf, casely-Hayford, Hutchison, Lutterodt, VanHein, Vroom and Van der Puije families, to name just a few, to know that their female progenitors were not enslaved women, but rather members of indigenous families who married European men.

Unions of this type, as well as less formal consensual relationships, were not unique to Ghana; rather they formed an important aspect in the development of many of West Africa’s coastal societies. This key facet of West African history is eclipsed when the history of mixed race people is collapsed inside the history of rape.

It is often forgotten that in many instances during the first 400 years of the colonial encounter, Europeans were at the mercy of their African hosts. One of the ways European men survived and even thrived during this period of the colonial encounter was by marrying or cohabiting with African women, who not only provided companionship, medical assistance and domestic services, but also valuable local connections.

Contrary to the notion that colonialism was a one-way street which led to the Europeanisation of Africans, European men were also Africanised—in large part through their relationships with African women. Marriage was used as a means of cementing alliances to advance the interests of both groups, particularly in coastal trade, and importantly such arrangements were made at the behest of Africans…

Read the entire article here.

When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature

University of Illinois Press
2003
328 pages
6 x 9 in.
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-02819-9

Edited by:

Jonathan Brennan, Professor of English
Mission College, Santa Clara, California

An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African-Native American descent

An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African American and Native American descent, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote is the first book to theorize an African-Native American literary tradition. In examining this overlooked tradition, the book prompts a reconsideration of interracial relations in American history and literature.

Jonathan Brennan, in a sweeping historical and analytical introduction to this collection of essays, surveys several centuries of literature in the context of the historical and cultural exchange and development of distinct African-Native American traditions. Positing a new African-Native American literary theory, he illuminates the roles subjectivity, situational identities, and strategic discourse play in defining African-Native American literatures.

Brennan provides a thorough background to the literary tradition and a valuable overview to topics discussed in the essays. He examines African-Native American political and historical texts, travel narratives, and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, suggesting that this evolving oral tradition parallels the development of numerous Black Indian literary traditions in the United States and Latin America.

The diverse essays cover a range of literatures from African-Native American mythology among the Seminoles and mixed folktales among the Cherokee to autobiography, fiction, poetry, and captivity narratives. Contributors discuss, among other topics, the Brer Rabbit tales, shifting identities in African-Native American communities, the “creolization” of African American and Native American mythologies and religions, and Mardi Gras Indian performance. Also considered are Alice Walker’s development of an African-Native American identity in her fiction and essays and African-Native American subjectivity in the works of Toni Morrison and Sherman Alexie.

Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century

Berghahn Books
2007
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84545-363-3
Paberback ISBN: ISBN 978-1-84545-711-2

Roger Sansi, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology
Goldsmith’s College, London

One hundred years ago in Brazil the rituals of Candomblé were feared as sorcery and persecuted as crime. Its cult objects were fearsome fetishes. Nowadays, they are Afro-Brazilian cultural works of art, objects of museum display and public monuments. Focusing on the particular histories of objects, images, spaces and persons who embodied it, this book portrays the historical journey from weapons of sorcery looted by the police, to hidden living stones, to public works of art attacked by religious fanatics that see them as images of the Devil, former sorcerers who have become artists, writers, and philosophers. Addressing this history as a journey of objectification and appropriation, the author offers a fresh, unconventional, and illuminating look at questions of syncretism, hybridity and cultural resistance in Brazil and in the Black Atlantic in general.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Culture and Objectification in the Black Rome
• 1. ‘Making the Saint’: Spirits, Shrines and Syncretism in Candomblé
• 2. From Sorcery to Civilisation: The Objectification of Afro-Brazilian Culture
• 3. From Informants to Scholars: Appropriating Afro-Brazilian Culture
• 4. From Weapons of Crime to Jewels of the Crown: Candomblé in Museums
• 5. From the Shanties to the Mansions: Candomblé as National Heritage
• 6. Modern Art and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Bahia
• 7. Authenticity and Commodification in Afro-Brazilian Art
• 8. Candomblé as Public Art: The Orixás of Tororó
• 9. Re-appropriations of Afro-Brazilian Culture
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

Salvador da Bahia, once the colonial capital of Brazil, is nowadays the capital of Afro-Brazilian culture. Some tourist brochures call it the ‘Black Rome’, ‘the biggest inheritor of African traditions out of Africa’, and ‘Cradle and home of African descendent traditions (including samba, capoeira and Candomblé)’. Candomblé in particular is often presented as the heart of this Afro-Brazilian culture.

The origin of the term ‘Candomblé is unknown, it seems to have appeared in Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century in reference to parties of slaves and freed slaves (sometimes in the plural, Candomblés), and also in connection with the practice of sorcery (feitigaria). Some sources presumed that these activities had an African origin; the newspapers often complained about the noise of drums at Candomblé parties, and the charlatanism of the sorcerers; but from very early on, people of all social groups, origins and races came to the parties and made use of sorcery. For the editor of a newspaper in 1868, ‘these absurd Candomblés are so rooted, that I do no longer admire seeing Black people involved, when White people are the more passionate devotees of the cause’.

Of course, few among the white or almost white upper classes would publicly acknowledge their participation: to do so would be an embarrassment. Now and then the police disbanded the Candomblés and the sorcerers were put on trial, their instruments confiscated as ‘weapons of sorcery’. Nonetheless, it seems that Candomblé was never just an exclusive, secretive and resistant African affair: the sorcerers often had powerful patrons, people from across Bahian society took part in it. In fact, the sorcery of Candomblé was seen by many as the hidden force dominating the city, and writers like Marques or Joao do Rio affirm that ‘we are all ruled by the sorcerer’.

But when newspapers today talk about Candomblé, they do not denounce evil sorcery and outrageous parties. Instead, Candomblé is praised as African religion and cultural heritage. The objects of Candomblé are presented in museums as works of art. Participating in Candomblé is not an indignity, but something to be proud of. Intellectuals and politicians make their attendance at and even their participation in its rituals, both public and official. Gilberto Gil, musician and Minister of Culture, is also a ‘lord’ (ogan) in a Candomblé house.

How did Candomblé go from Sorcery to National Heritage? How did Candomblé become ‘Culture’? This question has not been properly addressed until now. Since its very origin, the literature on Candomblé has been obsessed with demonstrating the African origins and continuities of its rituals and myths. This tradition of studies, what I will call ‘Afro-Brazilianism’, has built an image of Candomblé as a ‘microcosmic Africa’ (Bastide 1978c), where the philosophical and artistic essences of the continent are preserved.

In recent decades Afro-Brazilianism has been severely criticised by social scientists interested in racial politics, who have argued that Afro-Brazilian culture is an ‘invented tradition’, and Afro-Brazilianist discourse a form of domination by the Brazilian elites over the black populations of Brazil. In transforming Candomblé into folklore, Afro-Brazilianism has imposed a ‘culturalism1 more concerned with the protection of an objectified cultural heritage than with racial politics. In Hanchard’s terms Afro-Brazilian culture has been ‘reified’: ‘culture becomes a thing, not a deeply political process.’

This book starts trom a different point: the question is not if this culture is ‘authentic’ or a ‘fiction’, but how Candomblé has become Afro-Brazilian culture. Encompassing these two discourses, we will see how Afro-Brazilian culture is neither a repressed essence nor an invention, but the outcome of a dialectical process of exchange between the leaders of Candomblé and a cultural elite of writers, artists and anthropologists in Bahia. In this dialectical process the cultural and artistic values of national and international anthropologists, intellectuals and artists have been synthesised with the religious values of Candomblé, generating an unprecedented objectification: ‘Afro-Brazilian culture’. At the same time, the leaders of Candomblé have recognised their own practice as ‘Culture’, and have become the subjects of their own objectification.

The impasse between affirmative and critical views on Afro-Brazilian culture is a result of their rigid and incompatible notions of ‘culture’. For the Afro-Brazilianist tradition, African culture is an original, unchanging ‘system of representations’ that has resisted slavery, and which is ritually re-enacted in Candomblé. For its critics, this notion of ‘culture’ is a fixed image, a false projection of imperialist reason: Afro-Brazilian culture is just a masquerade that hides the racial inequalities of Brazil.

But a culture is neither a fixed ‘system of representations’ nor a rigid ideological projection. Cultures are always in construction: they are not immanent and self-contained, but transient and relative historical formations. And yet, this does not mean that they are just artificial and false constructions. After all, what is the problem with ‘culture becoming a thing’? Cultures are indeed the result of histories of objectification—processes of recognition of identity and alterity. But processes of objectification cannot be reduced to reification. Objectification does not preclude politics, but in many ways it is the precondition of any meaningful social action: it is precisely because culture is objectified that it can be discussed, used and appropriated by social actors.

This book will describe this process neither as resistance nor masquerade, but as a historical transformation of practices, values and discourses: a cultural history. On the one hand, it is unquestionable that many African traditions are present in Candomblé; nevertheless it is also true that its ritual practices have incorporated the history of Brazil in what has been called ‘syncretism’. On the other hand, intellectuals have objectified Candomblé as Afro-Brazilian culture. But this objectification is not just an ideological fixed image, a reification: it has been actively appropriated by the people of Candomblé, who have assumed the discourses and practices of Afro-Brazilian culture as their own. This process of appropriation can be understood in very similar terms to religious syncretism; in a way it has been a ‘syncretism of Culture’.

Before going any further, I will explain in more detail what I mean by ‘Culture’ and ‘objectification’, and how the Afro-Brazilian case can offer a particular perspective on a more universal cultural process of our time: the appropriation of ‘Culture’…

…The solution to the ‘Negro problem’ for this elite was the ‘whitening’ of Brazil (Skidmore 1995). Deploying in a very particular way the eugenic theories of their time, they thought that by increasing European immigration Brazil would progressively eliminate its majority of Black people (Moritz-Schwartz 1993). Blacks and mulattos, as degenerate races, would inevitably die out, unless they improved their ‘weak’ blood with the powerful new ‘stocks’ of Europeans that were arriving en masse in Brazil. But in Bahia there was no significant influx of European immigrants. There was no work for them: nourishing agriculture, and later industry, were concentrated in the south, around Sao Paulo. Bahia remained poor and Black, lost in its past, with a dormant economy, a provincial life and a small population until the 1940s. This is the period that Gil and Riserio (1988) have called a ‘hundred years of solitude’, beginning with the end of the slave trade. In this ‘decadent’ context, after three brilliant centuries of international exchange of people and things, Bahians were left to themselves: there was no substantial immigration or change in Bahia’s population, and a very specific local culture progressively took hold. Bahian society was extremely traditional, and marked by the cultural history of its overwhelming majority of African descendants…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy: By Way of Introduction

Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 4, Number 4 (2011)
pages 4-46
23 illustrations

Yaba Amgborale Blay, Assistant Teaching Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The cosmetic use of chemical agents to lighten the complexion of one’s skin, also referred to as skin whitening, skin lightening, and/or skin bleaching, is currently a widespread global phenomenon. While the history of skin bleaching can be traced to the Elizabethan age of powder and paint, in its current manifestations, skin bleaching is practiced disproportionately within communities “of color” and exceedingly among people of African descent. While it is true that skin bleaching represents a multifaceted phenomenon, with a complexity of historical, cultural, sociopolitical, and psychological forces motivating the practice, the large majority of scholars who examine skin bleaching at the very least acknowledge the institutions of colonialism and enslavement historically, and global White supremacy contemporarily, as dominant and culpable instigators of the penchant for skin bleaching. As an introduction to this Special Issue of The Journal of Pan African Studies focusing on skin bleaching and global White supremacy, the purpose of this paper is to critically examine the symbolic significance of whiteness, particularly for and among African people, by outlining the history of global White supremacy, both politically and ideologically, discussing its subsequent promulgation, and further investigating its relationship to the historical and contemporary skin bleaching phenomenon.

Read the entire article here.