I've heard about discrimination or even more barbaric stuff aimed at people with albinism, but it made me wonder, how common can they be that this is actually a problem? Albinism seems very rare, just based on how often I see people with it, for whatever little that's worth. But since we live in an age when any random fact can be found from any search engine, it's easy to search for "frequency of albinism." This is a top hit.
Albinism occurs in all racial and ethnic groups throughout the world. In the U.S., approximately one in 18,000 to 20,000 people has some type of albinism. In other parts of the world, the occurrence can be as high as one in 3,000.
Well, that settles that, then. It's more common in sub-Saharan Africa. Specific countries are listed by Google's AI Overview, which I don't want to quote for obvious reasons. Beyond that, there are different types of albinism, and I imagine some types are hard to distinguish from simply being blond. Now that I mention it, I can't help but wonder about Atossa. She was a blond baby even though Cassandane and I both have dark brown hair and we figured she'd just age out of it in a few years like a lot of kids do. She's 9 now and still blond.
There was a girl with albinism at my school for a few years. I didn't really know her because she was a few years younger. She had really bad eyesight though.
Not all albinos are completely unpigmented or even blond - you can have albinism and still have brown or red hair for example. A lot of white albinos just look like very fair-skinned white people.
The main health impact is actually various sorts of eye problem because melanin is part of retina development, unless you're in a very sunny country in which case the main health impact is sunburn and skin cancer risk, unless that very sunny country is in sub-Saharan Africa in which case the main health impact is that murderous superstitious lunatics will assume you're a witch and possibly chop your limbs off to use in magic spells.
So to 1, you have probably seen more albinos around than you think you have.
I remember in my dorm there was a black albino kid. I felt sympathetic to the various racial navigating he must be doing, because he looked white at half-glance. I'm not sure how obvious it would have been if you saw him out of context, but in the dorm he mostly hung out with a group of black kids, which made it clear (to me, anyway) that he was black.
1.last: Kids that are blond through childhood but turn brown haired as adults (rather than as children) are pretty common, I think. Newt was a very blond little boy, and still blond as a teen, and at 23 I still vaguely think of him as blond out of habit but someone who just met him wouldn't agree.
My father was apparently similar -- his mother didn't see him for over a year when he was in the Army in his early 20s, and was startled when he came home not-blond. By the time I remember him his hair was dark brown, nowhere near blond.
We all were dark-haired, but I hadn't realized until I went to college that my arm hair was bleached blond from the Florida sun. One semester in Michigan, and at the semester break, my arms were pale with dark hair, and it felt like I was looking at someone else's arm. I found it very upsetting to have that sense of dissociation.
6: Fair enough. I haven't checked exact dates, but I was definitely blond as a baby and had brown hair by let's say 5, so I assumed that if Atossa's hair color was going to change, it would have by 9. But maybe not.
So, somebody might have a cut you up to make a potion when you were four.
6: At 25 I still confused that other people thought I was not blond. Of course, I was not remotely blond. Force of habit, but feels awfully clueless in retrospect. But then there was the sun-bleaching thing for part of the year that probably prolonged the thought habit.
"Blond" is regional. At least what my wife, growing up around a bunch of Italians and not so many Scandinavians, calls people "blond" when I would call them "brown haired."
None of which has much to do with the topic.
I think I was blond at 9 and brunet by 16.
11: there was a funny Twitter thread a while back now about whether Luke Skywalker was blond and the phrase "blond in spirit" came up and it is perfect for those of us with dark blonde hair who nevertheless don't really seem to be brunette.
The
A neighbour when I was a kid was albino, in a very obvious way: pink eyes, silvery white hair, and she had very long hair, so the effect was quite striking. The minister (vicar) for our local Church of Scotland church--the one that ministered to our school--she had an adopted son who was black and albino. So even in my relatively small community, there was a couple of people with albinism.
There's an extremely haunting episode and photograph in British war photographer Don McCullin's* autobiography (Unreasonable Behaviour) concerning an alibino boy he photographed during the Biafran war which has stuck with me even though it's years since I read that.
* a man whose life is more dramatic than any movie.
11. I was put down as blond by Spanish immigration officials in the early 70s, when I had clearly dark brown hair by northern European standards. But in the 50s I was legitimately blond.
Also in the 50s I spent a couple of years in Tanganyika, now part of Tanzania, and there was a street cleaner we often saw who had albinism. I never saw anybody give him any shit, but maybe it was different when he got home. His complexion would have been unremarkable in Britain or Germany in 1958 and I wondered, as 7 year olds do, whether "white" people were descended from albino darker people.
ttaM's neighbour was, from his description, clearly not a girl. That was Johnny Winter.
Like a lot of people, I was very blonde until I was about 4, and then it gradually got darker. I was still quite reddish/auburn until I was in my early teens, and if I spend a lot of time in the sun, it goes much blonder, even now. The only real legacy is my beard, which has that variegated blonde, brown, ginger, grey, white thing happening.
There's a whole veldt-ish explanation,* with scientific publications to allegedly back it up, attempting to explain why northern Europeans, and especially Scots and Scandinavians, have a wider range of hair and eye colours than in most other places, and why this is particularly the case for women and children.
* beyond just "it's cold and dark most of the year, make less melanin so you don't die of rickets"