I am in Polignano a Mare, a seaside resort in Puglia, which forms the southern heel of the boot-shaped country of Italy. Polignano is a pretty town, spotlessly clean, its white villas setting off the deep sapphire blue of the Adriatic Sea. I get to a vantage point and look down at the beach far below.  It’s nothing at all like the sandy beaches of Kerala or Goa. Instead of soft sand it is covered with shingles, hard stones which look painful to walk upon.  Yet this stony stretch is packed, sardine-like, with people in skimpy beachwear soaking in the scorching sunlight which burns their Skin to a dark colour.

People who come from hot countries like India, avoid the sun as much as possible and many try to make themselves look more light-skinned than they actually are through the use of cosmetics.  India has a special skin whitening cream which is said to be the biggest selling product of its kind in the world.

In countries like India, a fair complexion is a social cachet, proclaiming to the world that one belongs to a privileged ancestry which has not needed to labour in the skin darkening sun. In cold countries, which have brief summers and long, grey winters, a tanned complexion shows that one has the time, and the money, to travel to exotic sunny climes and get rid of the sickly pallor that comes with cloudy, cheerless skies.

Seen in this light – or lack of light – our skin colour acquires shades of economic meaning which turns the bigotry of conventional racism – white people are always superior to black, or brown, people – upside down.

In a society such as India only too many of us, consciously or otherwise, subscribe to the white-is-better-than-black racist formula. But in many other, sunless societies, a dark complexion spells desirability and is a status symbol which tells your pale and envious neighbours that you’ve just been on a holiday to Polignano, or some such glamorous place.

Maybe one day black-and-white colour prejudices will cancel each other out. And we’ll all be happy to be a healthy shade of – what? Beige?