There will always be the odd ones out. But the general preference out this is the fairer the skin the better. Just go see the bleaching products for sale. Then there are those that do like tanned skins - tanned is different from dark skins. With tanned, there is often a healthy glow to it.
Yah it is not fair that is why the envious even coined the term dumb blonde (personally, I believe that all humans pretty much have same IQ regardless of skin color). Unfortunately for the envious, I have met (in business only lah) quite a few beautiful, blue eyed blondes, smart (Stanford) and uni tennis and swim team all rolled into one. Yes it is not fair. Apparently black babies prefer light color barbies.
The Chinese like to be fair and the Northerners tend to be fairer than Southerner. Same too for India where the Northern Indians are much fairer than the southern Tamils. Pretty sure that many Tamil girls wished that they are fairer.
Over in the US, we see lots of African American that are not as dark. Probably because of some mixed race along the line.
In short it is good to be fair because you could always decide to give yourself a nice deep tan but unfortuanately if one is dark skinned, you are dark skinned for life. Just a fact of life!!