“People aren’t brown,” my kindergarten teacher said, taking the crayon from my hand.
I looked down at my skin, toasted dark by the Texas sun, and struggled to understand.
I was a mixed race kid in the South—half white, half Chinese—but, for the most part, grew up blissfully sheltered from overt racism.
Sure, I experienced my fair share of casual racism, the kind that’s preceded by a wrinkling of the brow, wherein the wearer of said expression attempts to guess my ethnic origins and, giving up, asks, “Where are you from?”
The first time I saw this video, I laughed uncontrollably:
I internalized my fair share of racism, too, simply accepting, albeit begrudgingly, the fact that I would not be cast as Cinderella in the third grade play—nor would I be likely to play the lead role in anything, ever—because I did not have blonde hair and blue eyes.
I had no idea how deeply this affected me until recently, when I saw an advertisement for Pacific Northwest Ballet’s production of Cinderella. Cinderella looked like me1. In a room full of people, I felt hot tears streaming down my face, and made no effort to wipe them away.
My white husband has come to expect that it will take me at least five minutes longer to get through airport security, and that it’s highly likely I’ll be “randomly” searched. The only airport where this hasn’t held true is San Francisco, where most of the TSA agents look like they could be my relatives.
And I hate forms2 that say, “What is your race? Check one.” Am I White, Asian, or Other? Check one.
I am both, I am neither. Too Asian to be White, too White to be Asian.
My skin color is the median of skin tones. Send me to the makeup aisle for foundation, and the color in the exact middle of the neutral tones is probably a perfect match.
As a kid, though, especially in the summers, I was dark. I was brown. I was every brown person ever3, having been mistaken for every ethnicity you could think to mistake me for.
So Mrs. Henderson’s4 words made no sense to me, as I quietly colored the faces of my stick figure family.
“People aren’t brown.”
Not only was I sitting there in brown skin that begged to differ, this made no sense to me from an artistic perspective.
On our school supply list, we’d been instructed to bring a pack of eight crayons. The colors in a pack of eight crayons were, and are: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and black. The tiny artist in me couldn’t fathom how, from that limited array, brown wasn’t the most appropriate choice. Weren’t all people just shades of brown?
I didn’t have the words for any of this at the time. I remember only confusion. I remember taking the yellow and orange crayons and trying to blend some sort of peachy shade, which was met with approval. I remember thinking she was wrong.
“People aren’t brown.”
The phrase comes to me unbidden, at times, and confuses me as much now as it did then.
- All three of the principal dancers starring in the role that year had dark hair, and two of them were Asian. Representation matters. Thank you, PNB.
- Thankfully, questions worded this way are now the exception, where once they were the norm.
- Only for the briefest of moments, that is. My experience has been a piece of cake compared to what others deal with.
- Not her real name. Every other memory I have of this teacher is wonderful, so please don’t judge her too harshly.
