A good friend of mine once said to me, “Do you think you can think without arguing?” Looking around the room, I decided to think of my oil paints, a box of them, in the corner near an easel.
I pointed to my cheek. Have you ever seen a colour like this? What do you call it?
“Oh. That’s ‘skin colour’.”
Maybe I called it ‘skin colour’ when I was, uh, green. It is not like the basic colours, red, blue, and yellow, perhaps it is a colour, like ‘olive’, from nature. It is included in common selections of coloured pencils and crayons and markers and paints.
But it is likely you can anticipate my quarrel. For skins come in many colours and are observed under many light conditions. Pink, orange, purple . . . I leaned forward.
I don’t think the “black and brown” people I hear about on the T.V. news really refers to colour at all. Doesn’t it come from Toni Morrison’s book, Playing In The Dark? The “black and brown bodies” she says American novelists were fetishizing?
I went over and got a few tubes of paint. When I was a student, here in Niagara, I might have used the term ‘skin colour’ and that may have only been because that was what the colour seemed like to me. More likely, ‘skin colour’ was the rude name for it that my school-mates used as we worked on our art projects together in art classes, art teachers too, must have been sloppy and said ‘skin colour’ once in a while despite the facts.
I don’t know whether there ever was a colour marketed and sold as ‘skin colour’. Where and when? These days boxes of Crayola crayons include it, but Crayola has been calling it, is it, ‘peach’? All the skin colours in a box of Crayolas have poetic names and this is as it should be. We find ‘skin colour’ by analogy. If I see the same colour in the sun gleaming on a sandy beach as I do in a mump I don’t exclaim, Why that’s the best skin-coloured bit of sand that ever there was!
I remember when I read about The Hardy Boys’ ‘olive skinned’ friend my elementary school mind conjured up a green man (but not green because that’s impossible) like the olives in the refrigerator (it wasn’t until I was teenager that I ever saw a black olive). It didn’t occur to me that he was just darker skinned.
“Who was The Hardy Boy’s olive skinned friend?”
I don’t remember. But the real Franklin W. Dixon was a fellow Canadian. We can look it up.
So here are two tubes of paint. Both the same colour (approximately) but get a load of these names. Artist’s Loft calls it ‘Portrait Pink’ and Gamblin calls it ‘Caucasian Flesh Tone’. Personally, I have used it to paint landscapes, The Plume Over Niagara Falls:
Artist’s Loft and Gamblin’s names are other-words for ‘skin colour’ and therefore wrong. They both seem to assume that tubes of oil paint have an intention that any artist versed in colours would find foolish. After all I don’t use the colour orange to paint only oranges. It’s the same old ‘skin colour’, just with a politically correct name, a colour that in Artist’s Loft’s eyes, in Gamblin’s eyes, is specific in a way that should make people who are invested in art and think oil paints are smart, uncomfortable. It is a colour that has a narrative. An intent.
To my mind both large corporations are insufferable. The uniqueness of ‘flesh tint’ is the pink porcelain affect. Call it Pink Porcelain. Artist’s Loft’s colour is a sort of porcine face. Gamblin’s colour is more beautiful but the name for it is racist in just the way that anti-racists always end up being the thing they hate. The palms and soles of a- a skin with great contrasts, and everywhere else ‘flesh tint’ is used, are not Caucasian anything. It’s as offensive as That’s very white of you, indeed it’s the ignorant corporate mind that offends as it does everything not to offend. What colour do we use for a skin with vitiligo?
“But isn't it better still to give up finding things offensive altogether? Why should I care if Crayola calls one of its crayons . . . Honkey White!”
I laughed out loud!
“It used to be (and perhaps still is) a good defence here against the charge of slander that what was said was just 'common abuse'. What good sense!”
My good friend had stumped me. In an earlier draft I was pushing Crayola a little bit, insinuating something. Even here I am saying things about “the corporate mind”. But as to Why should we care? Bandaids? Yes, Bandaids. Instead of making them in shades of one colour they stuck to ‘skin colour’ as if it were a sort of statistical entity. And placated the disenfranchised customers calling for ‘black’ bandaids with Bandaids with graphics. Bandaids with pop art. Spiderman and Barbie. Or! It was noticed that instead of making more than one skin coloured Bandaid, Bandaid choose to abandon any other colour altogether and put on graphics as the anti-skin-colour option.
For Bandaid the problem was its historic uniformity. It was as much the colour of medicine as yellowed concrete hallways in Twentieth Century Hospitals. Perhaps Bandaid had no way of distributing the proper skin-coloured-product to the proper markets. The very data is obscene. This many brown bandaids and this many yellow bandaids . . . And so the beloved corporation of millions innovated. The Band-Aid solution was a band-aid solution!
It is bewildering to hear people, oratory! with words like “White” “Black” “Brown” “Yellow” in the gist of their speeches. Include our vestments and we’re the whole Rainbow! I mean is it any wonder these days when millions of people don’t own homes and can’t afford cars they end up adorning themselves? How can one remain unoffended? It’s not their fault.
Cosmetics deal with colours as part of the business. I can’t imagine a ‘Caucasian Red’ for lips or a ‘Caucasian Blue’ for eye-shadow . . .
I am making a big deal about this—I care about this as much as Shakespeare. Shakespeare found the word, “Negro”, literally calling someone black, offensive. He only used the word once in a play about bigotry, The Merchant Of Venice, and he used it to offend. Check Portia’s bigotry—she’s no saint. The Editors of the play might say that “negro” and “moor” were synonymous back then in a sort of gloss. So then why only once? One Editor used the “negro” scene to show that Shakespeare was carelessly borrowing from an ur-text. But maybe Shakespeare just liked the word “moor” more. He did make a pun with “moor” and “more” once or twice.
If Shakespeare were alive today I’m sure he would be appalled—appalled? or amused? that people are called, and call themselves by colours, making a sort of Gordian Knot out of history. . . .
I mean, I hear now that there's a movement to go back to the original Washington Redskin name and logo. I think the problem was the cancel culture folk were ignorant of what a redskin is—it didn’t refer to skin-colour, but was an authentic name for a purification ceremony where warriors would pigment themselves. The misinformed were misled by (of all things) Webster's Dictionary.
“Not racism then, just the lesser offence of cultural appropriation?”
Funny thing is the logo (when turned from an R to a portrait in the 70s) was made by an Indian artist and approved by an Indian council. If it was appropriation then it was the Indians appropriating an NFL team. The offense is (isn't it?) the stupidity! To my mind it’s the religious rainbow denatured for no reason, part of a horrible social (in the past we’d have called it psychological) drama. After all what does skin-colour signify?
“Flesh tint”, “flesh hue”: this has been the other companies (the other major manufacturers of ‘skin colour’)’s solution. What could it mean but bloodless, like the face of a ham?
I feel like The Merchant Of Venice’s lawyer’s legal point that flesh doesn’t include blood should include, And take no skin, either, Alien! If you want it to be flesh you should forfeit all skin!
1. A language game: Report whether a certain body is lighter or darker than another.
That’s a good question! Are we all the same colour but only different shades? Like blue? Light or dark it’s still called blue. Or even a colour like red where when light it is called pink? Or like orange where in the case of dark orange, the name becomes brown?
“I don't know whether it might be useful to hang something on but there's a book, for babies, called Tickle Tickle by Helen Oxenbury, that has a lot of different skin colours, in the first two being (if I remember correctly) not brown and white but brown and yellow.”
Do you have it with you?
“Yes, here it is.”
Well. It was handed over and I took a look. That’s a pretty stupid cover of a book. When I watch Park Chan Wook’s movies I never noticed that all the characters from that part of the world were the colour yellow! Something, apparently, that any baby knows. No doubt if the illustrator were to have sway with Rashomon all the figures would be in yellow highlighter. I mean, stop giving babies books like this! Learning to read isn’t by osmosis. Babies shouldn’t be helpless!