Last week at my local pharmacy, I spotted something I hadn’t seen
before. A box of Crayolas labeled “Colors of the World,” with 24 crayons
representing different skin tones.
An Internet search tells me this set hit the market about three years ago. (I’m not a parent or a teacher. I don’t always keep up.) Colors of the World is an expansion on the set of eight “Multicultural” Crayolas released in 1992. Which was itself an improvement on the days when there was just one skin-toned Crayola labeled FLESH.
Yeah, I’m old enough to remember that. A crayon that came real close to matching my Anglo-American skin. One I could use to color arms, legs and faces of the people in my pictures.
We hear a lot about systemic racism and unconscious bias. I see that FLESH Crayola as a classic example. I really don’t think the folks at Crayola were looking for ways to make black, brown and other-colored kids feel left out. I think they just didn’t see those kids. Crayola sold its first box of colors in 1903. For the first half-century or so, the company was no doubt dominated by white people. I’ll bet they were mostly decent people, dreaming up art supplies to brighten children’s lives. When they imagined little hands holding those crayons, they saw the pale hands of their own kids.
Before I tell the rest of this story, I should explain that I learned to read at an early age, well before I was old enough to go to school. I impressed Mom and Dad by reading street signs, Little Golden Books, the backs of cereal boxes. I read the labels on my Crayola wrappers. (BLUE VIOLET looked a lot like VIOLET BLUE until you got it on the page.) So I have a distinct memory of the day I reached for a FLESH Crayola and found it inexplicably labeled PEACH.
Hmmm, I thought. Must’ve grabbed the wrong crayon. I sifted through the set. FLESH was nowhere to be found, but this PEACH sure did look like the same color. As a devotee of the printed word, I was puzzled. FLESH and PEACH each had five letters; both ended in “H”. Had I just been imagining FLESH all along?
I hadn’t, of course. An article in Huffpost tells how a social researcher wrote to Crayola in 1962. The letter pointed out what should have been obvious: humans come in different shades, and some kids in their social experiments picked on other kids who weren’t colored “FLESH.” Not long after, the company changed that label from FLESH to PEACH.
I would have been six, going on seven, in 1962. I may have been older when I noticed the change; it’s not as if I got a new box of Crayolas every year. At that age, I knew perfectly well that people came in different colors. Still, it hadn’t seemed strange to me that the FLESH Crayola just happened to match my skin. Systemic racism. It’s all around us.
Change happens, but can be awfully slow. Thirty years elapsed between the renaming of FLESH and release of the Multicultural Crayolas. More than two decades later, we get Colors of the World. Those who follow such trends mostly see it as a positive change, but Crayola’s CEO took some heat for what he said in the 2020 news release:
“We have always been here,” groused one Twitter pundit. “It says a lot that the CEO of Crayola has only just now started to see us.”
Change comes slowly, and sometimes it seems to run backward. Looking over what I’ve just written, I’m thinking maybe I should have kept my thoughts to myself. What if some red-state politician reads this, decides Crayolas are too “woke,” and bans their use in public schools?
An Internet search tells me this set hit the market about three years ago. (I’m not a parent or a teacher. I don’t always keep up.) Colors of the World is an expansion on the set of eight “Multicultural” Crayolas released in 1992. Which was itself an improvement on the days when there was just one skin-toned Crayola labeled FLESH.
Yeah, I’m old enough to remember that. A crayon that came real close to matching my Anglo-American skin. One I could use to color arms, legs and faces of the people in my pictures.
We hear a lot about systemic racism and unconscious bias. I see that FLESH Crayola as a classic example. I really don’t think the folks at Crayola were looking for ways to make black, brown and other-colored kids feel left out. I think they just didn’t see those kids. Crayola sold its first box of colors in 1903. For the first half-century or so, the company was no doubt dominated by white people. I’ll bet they were mostly decent people, dreaming up art supplies to brighten children’s lives. When they imagined little hands holding those crayons, they saw the pale hands of their own kids.
Before I tell the rest of this story, I should explain that I learned to read at an early age, well before I was old enough to go to school. I impressed Mom and Dad by reading street signs, Little Golden Books, the backs of cereal boxes. I read the labels on my Crayola wrappers. (BLUE VIOLET looked a lot like VIOLET BLUE until you got it on the page.) So I have a distinct memory of the day I reached for a FLESH Crayola and found it inexplicably labeled PEACH.
Hmmm, I thought. Must’ve grabbed the wrong crayon. I sifted through the set. FLESH was nowhere to be found, but this PEACH sure did look like the same color. As a devotee of the printed word, I was puzzled. FLESH and PEACH each had five letters; both ended in “H”. Had I just been imagining FLESH all along?
I hadn’t, of course. An article in Huffpost tells how a social researcher wrote to Crayola in 1962. The letter pointed out what should have been obvious: humans come in different shades, and some kids in their social experiments picked on other kids who weren’t colored “FLESH.” Not long after, the company changed that label from FLESH to PEACH.
I would have been six, going on seven, in 1962. I may have been older when I noticed the change; it’s not as if I got a new box of Crayolas every year. At that age, I knew perfectly well that people came in different colors. Still, it hadn’t seemed strange to me that the FLESH Crayola just happened to match my skin. Systemic racism. It’s all around us.
Change happens, but can be awfully slow. Thirty years elapsed between the renaming of FLESH and release of the Multicultural Crayolas. More than two decades later, we get Colors of the World. Those who follow such trends mostly see it as a positive change, but Crayola’s CEO took some heat for what he said in the 2020 news release:
“With the world
growing more diverse than ever before, Crayola hopes our new
Colors of the World crayons will increase representation…”
Colors of the World crayons will increase representation…”
“We have always been here,” groused one Twitter pundit. “It says a lot that the CEO of Crayola has only just now started to see us.”
Change comes slowly, and sometimes it seems to run backward. Looking over what I’ve just written, I’m thinking maybe I should have kept my thoughts to myself. What if some red-state politician reads this, decides Crayolas are too “woke,” and bans their use in public schools?
