In 2006, Dwight Turner, a twenty-eight-year-old Atlanta native, moved to Thailand. Not long after arriving, Turner told me, he went to a prestigious Bangkok elementary school to interview for a teaching position. But when the administrator saw Turner, who is African-American, he made it clear that Turner would not be hired. “You’ll scare the children,” the man said.

As many people of color who have lived in Thailand can attest, problematic racial attitudes are commonplace in the country. Black people frequently face discrimination in the workplace and scrutiny from police; many Thais have an aversion to dark skin. In the World Values Survey, which measures attitudes on a variety of issues, twenty-eight per cent of Thai respondents said in 2007 that they would not like to have neighbors of a different race. That compares with less than five per cent who said the same in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Brazil, and Norway, among other countries.

Thailand is by no means an outlier among Asian countries: the proportion of respondents who said that they wouldn’t like to have neighbors of a different race was lower in China, Taiwan, and Malaysia, but higher in India, South Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia. But in recent months, a series of controversies over the depiction of skin color has focused attention on racial attitudes in Thailand, in particular.

In August, a strange advertising campaign appeared on Bangkok’s mass-transit train system. Posters showed a woman, her face painted black and her lips bright red, holding up a black donut; it was a promotion for a new Dunkin’ Donuts treat. The accompanying television ads, which carried the slogan “Break every rule of deliciousness,” portrayed a light-skinned young woman eating the donut and then turning black. The ad attracted international criticism. Human Rights Watch labeled the advertisements “bizarre and racist,” and Dunkin’ Brands’ chief communications officer, Karen Raskopf, apologized.

But the C.E.O. of the separate Thai franchise, Nadim Salhani, initially called questions about the advertisements “paranoid American thinking.” He told the Associated Press, “It’s absolutely ridiculous. We’re not allowed to use black to promote our doughnuts? I don’t get it. What’s the big fuss? What if the product was white and I painted someone white, would that be racist?” He added, “Not everybody in the world is paranoid about racism.”

More recently, ads for a skin-whitening product, Unilever’s Citra Pearly White UV body lotion, appeared on TV and online, offering a thirty-two-hundred-dollar prize for a university student whose photo of herself, in her school uniform, best showed the lotion’s “product efficacy.” Unilever apologized for any “misunderstandings,” but the contest continued as planned.

Many people in Thailand—and throughout Asia and other regions—take rigorous precautions to protect their skin from the sun, preferring a light complexion that has historically indicated that one doesn’t labor outdoors. A common perception in Thailand is that those who have lighter skin come from higher social strata, while those with darker complexions hail from the country’s poorer, rural regions. Television advertisements for skin-whitening products are commonplace during daytime soap operas, and billboards for cars and other high-end goods typically feature light-skinned actors. Turner, who now works as a social-media expert, told me that the constant barrage of skin-whitening commercials sends a message that dark skin isn’t acceptable, and that everyone should yearn to be as white as possible.

Now, images have surfaced online of November’s Vogue Thailand cover, which shows Naomi Campbell, the British supermodel, with a skin tone that appears dramatically lighter than Campbell’s skin typically does. (Vogue and the New Yorker are both owned by Condé Nast.) “Naomi Campbell Looks Really Different On Vogue Thailand Cover…” read a Huffington Post headline. Julia Sonenshein wrote on the fashion blog The Gloss, “Naomi Campbell is undeniably gorgeous, and Vogue Thailand made a huge mistake trying to make her into something that she’s not.” A Thai woman who blogs about social issues and goes by Kaewmala, a pseudonym, wrote on Twitter, “Oi. Light-skinned, blue/gray-eyed Naomi Campbell? Brought to you by Vogue Thailand. Truly Thailand.” She continued, “@VogueThailand had a most perfect black-is-beautiful message in Naomi Campbell. But what did it do? Made her light-skinned. Truly Thailand.”

Tachol Kajornmasabusapa, the digital editor for Vogue Thailand, told me the magazine hadn’t lightened Campbell’s skin in the image. She said that the model’s complexion on the cover was the result of “the technique of the photographer,” and that Campbell had worn colored contact lenses during the shoot. “We didn’t do any Photoshop or anything,” Tachol said, adding that Campbell’s agency had approved the photo. (A spokeswoman for Vogue in the U.S. directed questions about the cover to Condé Nast International’s international communications director, who declined to comment. A representative at Campbell’s agency, TESS Management, directed inquiries to the agency’s public-relations firm, where a publicist did not respond to requests for comment.)

Marcin Tyszka, the photographer who shot the cover and other images of Campbell for the issue, told me that the photos are indicative of the “pastel and light” style he prefers. Campbell “looks a little more pale, but she is still a black woman,” he said. He said Campbell’s appearance might be “surprising,” but that fashion photography “is not reportage of people on the street. Every picture is a kind of creation.” Asked to elaborate on how he achieved the lighter tone, he said it largely had to do with lighting and makeup.

Campbell’s skin has appeared lighter than what seems to be its natural color before. But the Vogue Thailand cover seems especially striking in the context of the controversies that preceded it.

Chalidaporn Songsamphan, a political-science professor and specialist in feminism and the politics of sexuality at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, told me that notions of beauty in Thailand have been influenced by Western standards and, in recent decades, by fashions from Japan and South Korea, where women typically have lighter skin. But it’s “quite fickle” to label the Dunkin’ Donuts ad and Citra contest racist, she said, because many Thais are simply unaware that the portrayal of dark-skinned people is offensive. In other words, the ads aren’t racist, because those behind them didn’t intend to hurt anyone.

But that, of course, is the problem: An image can carry racist connotations regardless of the motives of those who created it. In Thailand, which is largely ethnically homogenous, many see racism as a Western issue—something for multicultural societies like those in the U.S. or the U.K. to debate. In Thailand, the argument goes, a preference for light skin is less fraught because it is a cosmetic issue that springs from a desire to look fashionable and wealthy, and is not connected to a legacy of slavery, disenfranchisement, and marginalization. A distaste for dark skin seems innocuous to some Thais. This is, of course, deeply offensive to darker-skinned Thais, not to mention people of color and other non-Thais. Thailand may not share the U.S. and other countries’ legacy of black slavery, but skin-color ideals there—as in the U.S. and elsewhere—remain inextricably linked to ideas about class. Race and class implications aside, treating some people preferentially because of their skin color is, of course, itself discriminatory.

Meanwhile, Thailand is becoming somewhat more diverse. By 2010, non-Thais grew to nearly five per cent of the population, according to Thailand’s National Statistical Office. This comes as low-wage migrant workers have arrived from neighboring countries to work in industries like fishing and frozen-food preparation, along with Western expatriates like Turner.

The heated response to the skin-color images and ads comes more swiftly as news from Thailand—and elsewhere, for that matter—is disseminated online and across international borders, and is discussed not only among Thai people but in an international context.

It would seem that Thai attitudes about skin color may begin to change as they are influenced by international perspectives, and as Thailand becomes more diverse. Yukti Mukdawijitra, an anthropology professor at Thammasat, believes that may be unlikely—at least in the near future. The notion that white skin is good and black skin is bad is “embedded in Thai culture,” he said, and that doesn’t seem to be changing.

Photograph by Grant Peck/AP.