Brown, Yes! Black, No!

Trey Smith

A doctor in a white lab coat stands at the pearly gates. The voice of God booms, "And your good deeds?" The man responds, "Well, as a dermatologist, I've been warning people that sunlight will kill them and that it is as deadly as smoking."

His smug smile fades as God snaps, "You're saying that sunlight, which I created to keep you alive, give you vitamin D, and make you feel good, is deadly? And the millions of dollars you received from chemical sunscreen companies had nothing do with your blasphemy?"

A bottle of SPF 1,000 sunscreen materializes in the dermatologist's hand. "You'll need that where you're going," God says.

The scene is part of a training video for tanning salon employees made by the International Smart Tan Network, an industry group. The tone is tongue-in-cheek, but it's part of a defiant campaign to defend the $4.9 billion industry against mounting evidence of its questionable business practices and the harm caused by tanning. And, in an extraordinary touch, it is portraying doctors and other health authorities as the true villains — trying to counter a broad consensus among medical authorities that sunbed use increases the risk of skin cancer including melanoma, the most lethal form.
~ from Can Indoor Tanning Prevent Breast Cancer and Autism? by Bridget Huber ~

You might think I'm going to focus on yet another sleazy corporate ad campaign, but there is something else about the issue of tanning -- however one does it -- that really gets me. In America and many other places dominated by Caucasians, blacks are looked down on. Many whites believe that Negroes are inferior and some really reactionary folks aren't even sure if they belong to the same species as the rest of us.

So, if dark skin is so "bad," why do so many white people spend considerable time and money on getting a tan? If you think about this issue for half a second, it doesn't make any sense!

White people strive to make their skin as dark as possible and then turn around to discriminate against those whose skin is that way naturally. WTF?