In London, around 2017, I remember a headline treated like a victory: mixed-race births had overtaken white births. The tone was congratulatory, as if the old racial order were finally dissolving into something cleaner and calmer, and I believed it because I wanted to. Now I think I was watching the wrong part of the story. “Mixed” rarely hardens into a stable third identity; it works more like a hallway, and hallways lead somewhere. Colorism tilts the floor. Lighter skin and more European features move with less resistance through the places that decide how comfortable a life feels: dating, hiring, housing, the small relief of being assumed competent. Nobody has to announce it. A reward system teaches without speaking, and gravity does the rest. When ease keeps collecting at one end of the spectrum, people adjust. What begins as strategy becomes habit, habit turns into taste, and taste eventually pretends to be nature. The lineage does not vanish; it thins socially, until it reads as a charming family detail instead of a lived constraint.

That is why the American story of Europeans “becoming white” reveals something colder than assimilation. In the United States, Germans and Sicilians, Swedes and Greeks; people who were never equals at home; were folded into one category. You might expect that to discredit the whole ranking. Instead it built a ladder. Groups climbed, then treated the rung beneath them as proof the ladder was fair. Northern Italians did not conclude that color ranking was absurd; they decided they were the real Italians, and that the South was basically Africa. The same reflex shows up in Spain, where the North is cast as the “real” country and the South as poorer, softer, suspect, and in France, where the center looks toward its Mediterranean edges with a familiar squint. Whiteness is not biological purity; it is a hierarchy disguised as harmony.

The scale does not stop at Europe’s borders. From Tunisia and Brazil to India and the Philippines, different histories, same bargain: the lighter you are, the closer you sit to ease and power. What began as a colonial ordering has aged into a global taste that now enforces itself, no white hand required. The cruelest turn comes after promotion. Those who have just crossed the threshold rarely feel safe there, so they become the strictest gatekeepers, trained to treat acceptance as a lease, not a deed. The irony even comes with its own footnote: Thilo Sarrazin, one of Germany’s harshest critics of Muslim immigration, carries a surname he once linked to “Saracen,” the old European term for Muslims.

Then social media turned the hallway into a moving walkway. Algorithms reward faces that signal status through polish, leisure, and the expensive kind of plain. Filters make brightening and smoothing feel like routine maintenance until the edited face becomes the reference point and the real one starts to look like an uncorrected draft. The algorithm does not care about heritage; it amplifies what performs, and what performs is what the world already priced as desirable.

So the question is not whether color still matters. It is what integration means inside a system that pays dividends for looking closer to the preferred template. The old story was binary: you are this or you are not. The newer one is conditional: you can belong, if you keep moving in the right direction. We traded a theory of bloodlines for a theory of gradients and features, and called it progress. We did not dissolve the ranking; we refined it, and for anyone too impatient to climb one generation at a time, there are doctors who specialize in shortcuts. But privilege cannot stay privileged if the drawbridge is lowered for too many, so the language of purity is never gone for long. It just waits for its next excuse.