---
product_id: 2252092
title: "Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color"
price: "$106.95"
currency: USD
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.us/products/2252092-living-color-the-biological-and-social-meaning-of-skin-color
store_origin: US
region: United States of America
---

# Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color

**Price:** $106.95
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- **What is this?** Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color
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## Description

Living Color is the first book to investigate the social history of skin color from prehistory to the present, showing how our body’s most visible trait influences our social interactions in profound and complex ways. In a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, Nina G. Jablonski begins with the biology and evolution of skin pigmentation, explaining how skin color changed as humans moved around the globe. She explores the relationship between melanin pigment and sunlight, and examines the consequences of rapid migrations, vacations, and other lifestyle choices that can create mismatches between our skin color and our environment. Richly illustrated, this book explains why skin color has come to be a biological trait with great social meaning― a product of evolution perceived by culture. It considers how we form impressions of others, how we create and use stereotypes, how negative stereotypes about dark skin developed and have played out through history―including being a basis for the transatlantic slave trade. Offering examples of how attitudes about skin color differ in the U.S., Brazil, India, and South Africa, Jablonski suggests that a knowledge of the evolution and social importance of skin color can help eliminate color-based discrimination and racism.

Review: Wonderfully Lucid, Scholarly, Humane Analysis of a Deeply Political Topic - It is a very rare phenomenon for a major scholar like Nina Jablonski to write both for an academic audience (see her 2006 book, Skin: A Natural History) and a general audience a few years later. The challenges are enormous: how to summarize vast amounts of research that move across many disciples (evolutionary biology, human anatomy and physiology, paleontology, anthropology, nutrition, psychology, and culture -- to name just a few) without trivializing the insights of specialists OR numbing the mind of non-specialist readers. Anyone who wants to understand why skin color has acquired the meanings we give it should read both books, but I suspect that most readers will find the more recent book entirely sufficient. But "Living Color" is far,far more than sufficient: it is provocative without being polemical. Jablonski marshalls an astonishing academic literature that sheds light on the historical development of skin color -- why and how it developed -- and then illuminates the various ways that culture have attributed meaning to visual difference. So deeply was the instinct not just to "see" but to "evaluate" that the travel literature from early European explorers confirmed prejudices that they had brought to their voyages. "Color" thus became an integral feature of colonization. Being "color blind" was never an option. But everyone already knows this, right? What was new for me was how "color" was as a signifier within the same color group -- not just between groups. I didn't know about the differences between genders either. The adjectives that we have learned to name races are just that -- and very imprecise at that. (I am old enough to remember a Crayola named "flesh.") Who knew that Vitamin D plays such an important role in human development and health? I didn't. Where would I learn about the impact of "tanning salons" for cultures that value a particular hue or "skin whitening" for cultures that seek to avoid it? The book is lavishly illustrated and carefully indexed -- a rarity in books written for a general audience. It even has a first-rate bibliography. I cannot imagine a more helpful or humane introduction. The author is erudite but wears her learning lightly. The use of side boxes is a bonus for clarifying complex issues, and there is not a single illustration that I would omit. I do wish, however, that the publisher had reprinted all of the plates found in the 2006 volume in this book -- they are relevant here as well. Serious readers? Read both books, but if you have time for only one, I strongly recommend "Living Color."
Review: Yes! The Only Race IS The Human Race - Absolutely excellent and flawless. Nina Jablonski's "Living Color" should forever put to rest any arrogance, ignorance or self-serving arguments that breathe air into racism, racists of all colors, or any subtle justifications supporting or tolerating it. This should be a standard text in every college and junior-senior year of high school that wants to genuinely educate and enlighten its students about humanity. Dr. Jablonski has authored an indisputable book on the obvious irrelevance of race and so-called racial differences, with great photos, illustrations and clear details. This book greatly enhances her "Skin Deep" lectures and documentaries on YouTube. Nevertheless, until much of human nature and racially socialized people discards this human weakness, we'll have to occasionally suffer from every knuckle-dragging knucklehead that believes they have an ounce of superiority or entitlement over other humans. Even in this 21st century, we're still on a disastrous race-based journey to the bottom --- no matter how we disguise it through rhetoric, politics, politricks, policies, religion or one's own sense of (false) entitlement over other people. After reading Living Color, I concluded that any form of racism practiced or tolerated by anyone is actually the expression and clear evidence of one's own inferiority.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #1,303,047 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #136 in Physical Anthropology (Books) #626 in Anatomy (Books) #2,037 in Cultural Anthropology (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.3 out of 5 stars 98 Reviews |

## Images

![Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71TbC1AhbAL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Wonderfully Lucid, Scholarly, Humane Analysis of a Deeply Political Topic
*by M***X on August 5, 2013*

It is a very rare phenomenon for a major scholar like Nina Jablonski to write both for an academic audience (see her 2006 book, Skin: A Natural History) and a general audience a few years later. The challenges are enormous: how to summarize vast amounts of research that move across many disciples (evolutionary biology, human anatomy and physiology, paleontology, anthropology, nutrition, psychology, and culture -- to name just a few) without trivializing the insights of specialists OR numbing the mind of non-specialist readers. Anyone who wants to understand why skin color has acquired the meanings we give it should read both books, but I suspect that most readers will find the more recent book entirely sufficient. But "Living Color" is far,far more than sufficient: it is provocative without being polemical. Jablonski marshalls an astonishing academic literature that sheds light on the historical development of skin color -- why and how it developed -- and then illuminates the various ways that culture have attributed meaning to visual difference. So deeply was the instinct not just to "see" but to "evaluate" that the travel literature from early European explorers confirmed prejudices that they had brought to their voyages. "Color" thus became an integral feature of colonization. Being "color blind" was never an option. But everyone already knows this, right? What was new for me was how "color" was as a signifier within the same color group -- not just between groups. I didn't know about the differences between genders either. The adjectives that we have learned to name races are just that -- and very imprecise at that. (I am old enough to remember a Crayola named "flesh.") Who knew that Vitamin D plays such an important role in human development and health? I didn't. Where would I learn about the impact of "tanning salons" for cultures that value a particular hue or "skin whitening" for cultures that seek to avoid it? The book is lavishly illustrated and carefully indexed -- a rarity in books written for a general audience. It even has a first-rate bibliography. I cannot imagine a more helpful or humane introduction. The author is erudite but wears her learning lightly. The use of side boxes is a bonus for clarifying complex issues, and there is not a single illustration that I would omit. I do wish, however, that the publisher had reprinted all of the plates found in the 2006 volume in this book -- they are relevant here as well. Serious readers? Read both books, but if you have time for only one, I strongly recommend "Living Color."

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Yes! The Only Race IS The Human Race
*by M***S on November 19, 2014*

Absolutely excellent and flawless. Nina Jablonski's "Living Color" should forever put to rest any arrogance, ignorance or self-serving arguments that breathe air into racism, racists of all colors, or any subtle justifications supporting or tolerating it. This should be a standard text in every college and junior-senior year of high school that wants to genuinely educate and enlighten its students about humanity. Dr. Jablonski has authored an indisputable book on the obvious irrelevance of race and so-called racial differences, with great photos, illustrations and clear details. This book greatly enhances her "Skin Deep" lectures and documentaries on YouTube. Nevertheless, until much of human nature and racially socialized people discards this human weakness, we'll have to occasionally suffer from every knuckle-dragging knucklehead that believes they have an ounce of superiority or entitlement over other humans. Even in this 21st century, we're still on a disastrous race-based journey to the bottom --- no matter how we disguise it through rhetoric, politics, politricks, policies, religion or one's own sense of (false) entitlement over other people. After reading Living Color, I concluded that any form of racism practiced or tolerated by anyone is actually the expression and clear evidence of one's own inferiority.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ futility in deconstruction of race
*by S***Y on November 24, 2012*

Jablonski does an excellent job in detailing why and how the concept of "race" is constructed, not discovered. A vivid exercise in postmodern deconstruction, it seems also to construct, itself, a sword of Damocles. It is this discussion that is missing from Jablonski's book. Precarious is the pronouncement that race is not real when such also marks the very context of the pride of a people defined by this thing called race. Racial pride was the civil-rights wave that carried black Americans out of the internalized oppression hoist upon them by the dominant culture, and racial pride is threatened by the very idea that race is not real - however positive the intent in so doing. While I understand and highly value the postmodern urge to deconstruct harmful binaries, sometimes such a process, while valid in an intellectual sense, just doesn't go down well. It is a process grounded in a value system that the dominant culture (that uses 'race' to oppress) does not adhere to. Telling a KKK member that race is not real is as absurd as telling a Jew in Auschwitz that race is not real -- it flies in the face of personal experience. Unless and until the dominant culture can accept the concept as valid, it is largely an exercise in futile, if not deadly, absurdity for the non-dominant people to accept it. I write this from personal experience, as I have encountered a marked degree of insult by those minority populations with whom I have attempted this feat (deconstruct race). Unfortunately, it is a deconstruction with very limited influence, and it does not, alone, address the consciousness which drives the judgemental quality of racism. If the judgementalness is removed from "race", then what is remaining is distinction. And distinction, pure distinction, does not require further deconstruction to remedy harm. It is harmless, indeed, necessary. Steven Brody

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*Last updated: 2026-10-14*