Climate warming leads to a decrease in biodiversity. Organisms can deal with the new prevailing environmental conditions by one of two main routes, namely evolving new genetic adaptations or through phenotypic plasticity to modify behaviour and physiology. Melanin-based colouration has important functions in animals including a role in camouflage and thermoregulation, protection against UV-radiation and pathogens and, furthermore, genes involved in melanogenesis can pleiotropically regulate behaviour and physiology.
Current evidence supports the idea that differently colored individuals are differentially sensitive to climate change. Predicting which of dark or pale color variants (or morphs) will be more penalized by climate change will depend on the adaptive function of melanism in each phenotype or species as well as how the degree of colouration covaries with behaviour and physiology.
For instance, because climate change leads to a rise in temperature and UV-radiation and dark coloration plays a role in UV-protection of fertility, dark individuals may be less affected from global warming, if this phenomenon implies more solar radiation particularly in habitats of pale individuals. In contrast, as desertification increases, pale coloration may expand in those increasingly arid regions, whereas dark colourations may expand in regions where humidity is predicted to increase. Dark coloration may be also indirectly selected by climate warming because genes involved in the production of melanin pigments confer resistance to a number of stressful factors including those associated with climate warming.
Furthermore, darker melanic individuals are commonly more physically adaptable than paler conspecifics, and hence they may better cope with competitive interactions due to invading species that expand their range in northern latitudes and at higher altitudes. To conclude, melanin may be a major component involved in adaptation to climate warming,
What is the definition of a colored/coloured or person of color?
In many different cultures and countries around the world, skin color plays a huge role in the concept of beauty. Lighter skin is often preferable to darker skin in a colonized mind. A colonial mentality or colonized mind reflects the internalized attitude of ethnic or cultural inferiority felt by people as a result of colonization, i.e. them being colonized by another group. It corresponds with the belief that the cultural values of the colonizer are inherently superior to one's own. People (Persons) of Color (POC): A term primarily used in the United States and Canada to describe any person who is not white. Does not solely refer to African Americans; rather, it encompasses all non-white groups and emphasizes the common experiences of systemic racism.
IN Brazil “They divided the offspring of white and black and intermediate shades into 128 divisions. The true Mulatto was the child of the pure black and the pure white. The child of the white and a Mulatto woman was a quarteron with 96 parts white and 32 parts black. But the quarteron (Quadroon) could be produced by the white and the marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the white and the sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56, and so on all through the 128 varieties. But the sang-mele with 127 white parts and l black part was still a man of colour.”
American immigration policy in recent years has favored middle class Asian immigrants. Their arrival conflates the black/white dichotomy that led to so much social unrest in the 1960s. This can be seen in the area of Affirmative Action policies where it has been widely remarked that those who would benefit most from their termination would not be White Americans, but the children of Asian immigrants! Popular in Marxist academic circles, the concept of Asian immigrants to the US acting as a “buffer race” has never made it to the mainstream. I would argue that part of the reason for this lies in the intrenched logic of American “multiculturalism.” According to the dominant narrative, America is a “salad” (no longer a “melting pot”) in which each culture adds its own unique flavor to the mix. This narrative hides the very different histories of the tapestry of the diaspora and America’s various ethnic portions of the global melanated majority.
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