While it's not important enough for genetic engineering on it's own, I'd probably edit my children to be darker. Having spent a few days on the beach in Thailand, the genetic inferiority of my own fair skin is quite visible and painful.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved...
It is reasonable to think that there the significant drawbacks associated with that hacked-together solution are no longer necessary because modern diets easily give adequate vitamin D.
https://pixabay.com/p-199674/?no_redirect
https://tonycavanagh.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/5005.jpg
Hardly a big difference. For genetic modification, the best solution is to increase range of tanning rather than changing the constant. It's already possible to get black skin [0] with eg. melanotan-2, so it's not that big of a change.
Similarly, I'd like them to be born intelligent and naturally athletic.
"It is evident that as much as 69%-82% of the South Asian populations in India had 25(OH)D levels in plasma less than the minimum acceptable levels of 20 ng/ml"
Skin colors evolved when most people were outside for the entire day. Now the opposite is true.
[0] http://www.pjms.com.pk/issues/octdec208/article/reviewarticl...
Not all of us have your superpower :) I've managed to tan 1/32 of my summers.
Some aspects of cultural, ethnic and religious identity are associated with and expressed by genetic factors like skin color.
For African Americans, just to give an example, the premise of "editing" children to be "whiter" might appear to enable racial genocide.
It doesn't apply only to skin color - some deaf people would consider genetically engineering away deafness an attack on "deaf culture."
But with what you describe as "genocide," not a single person is harmed. To me, an African American person has the same intrinsic value as a white person or anyone else. Therefore, I can't see any particular reason why I should care if we have more or fewer African Americans in the world.
I'm familiar with the argument made by deaf people. But those advocates never seem to address the reversal argument; why shouldn't we also produce new deaf people (e.g. by sedating some children and painlessly puncturing their eardrums) in pursuit of this goal?
It's not a rational way of thinking, but it is common.
Your argument is merely a straw man that left wing types smugly create and then dismiss to portray those they disagree with as stupid.
Yellow-skinned Africans would still be Africans, purple-skinned Asians would still be Asians, and green-skinned Europeans would still be Europeans.
When Obama was first running, there were discussions about whether or not he was "black enough" to really represent African American culture as President. Part of that was because of his upbringing (because, unfortunately, there is the perception that being educated, well spoken and wealthy is somehow antithetical to "true blackness") but part of it was the lightness of his skin color. It would have likely been easier for some people to accept his "white" background if he'd been physically darker.
You yourself correlated European with "white" in an earlier (probably still flagged) comment, so you know that references to skin color can seem intrinsic to many things to which it doesn't really apply.
Is this like reductio ad absurdum of PC signalling? Where do you spend the other 362 days of the year? In an environment that fair skin provides advantages for things like vitamin D production perhaps?
I find it very entertaining to be accused of PC signalling a few days after being accused of white supremacy.