Brant Gardner, a Mesoamericanist and author of the 6-volume Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon (SLC: Greg Kofford Books, 2007) wrote on
this issue in his commentary and allowed it to be reproduced by FairMormon on
its blog. It goes into all the relevant issues, and I would highly recommend
reading it:
One excerpt (among many) that is worth quoting here is
the following::
What about the “dark skin” of the Lamanites and the “fair skin”
of the Nephites? In the first place, the terms are relative. How dark is dark?
How white is fair? An early Spaniard, Tomas Medel, noted around AD 1560 that
the Indians in the Pacific coastal areas of Guatemala, where I place the
earliest Lamanites, were darker than those in the cooler, higher areas, where
the first Nephites lived. The highlanders, Medel said, “appeared but little
different from the Spaniards.” That observation is underlined by a historical
incident that took place at the other end of Mesoamerica during Cortez’s
conquest of the Aztecs. Faced by a rebellion at his base on the Gulf of Mexico,
the commander sent spies from Central Mexico to assess the situation. Among a
party of his Indian allies he sent along two Spaniards of relatively dark
complexion, clothed like the natives. They succeeded in being in the camp of
the rebel Spaniards for a lengthy period, then returned to report the state of
affairs, their own Spanish identity never being detected by their countrymen.
Padre Thomas Gage called the Indian people of central Chiapas “fair of
complexion” and the natives of Nicaragua “indifferent white.” On the other
hand, the color of other Indians approached what could be called “a skin of
blackness” (2 Ne. 5:21; this metaphor was used only once in the text—all other
references are only to “darkness”).
The skin shades of surviving peoples in Book of Mormon lands
include a substantial range, from dark brown to virtual white. These colors
cover nearly the same range as were found anciently around the Mediterranean
coast and in the Near East. It is likely that the objective distinction in skin
hue between Nephites and Lamanites was less marked than the subjective
difference. The scripture is clear that the Nephites were prejudiced against
the Lamanites (Jacob 3:5, Mosiah 9:1-2, Alma 26:23-25). That must have
influenced how they perceived their enemies. The Nephite description of the
Lamanites falls into a pattern known in the Near East. The Sumerian city
dwellers in Mesopotamia of the third millennium BC viewed the Amorites,
Abraham’s desert-dwelling relatives, as “dark” savages who lived in tents, ate
their food raw, left the dead unburied, and cultivated no crops. Urban Syrians
still call the Bedouin nomads “the wild beasts.” The Nephite picture of their
relatives, in Jarom 1:6 and Enos 1:20, sounds so similar to the Near Eastern
epithets that this language probably should be considered a literary formula
rather than an objective description, labeling applied to any feared, despised,
“backward” people. But all this does not exclude a cultural and biological difference
between the two groups. The question is how great the difference was; we may
doubt that it was as dramatic as the Nephite record keepers made out.