One afternoon several years ago, I was standing with my right hand pressed on the Mexican tiles of my kitchen counter. Some tiles have designs on them and some are solid off-white.
I had been in a reverie, then I came out of it and looked at my hand. How darned colorful it was!
Hey, I thought -- I'm not white. That tile isn't even white and it dramatically offsets my hand.
I stood there and tried to think of the color of my skin. A shade of brown for sure, but in more visual and interesting terms it is the color of chicken broth mixed with peach juice and those red threads of the peach around the pit that invariably get stuck in your teeth.
As a member of the chicken broth-peach juice subset of humanity, I went forth as a proselyte, thinking it would be fun to get other people to do what I had done.
That experience marked my transformation from being white to being a shade of brown. I remember being excited by how obvious this truth has been all along. Some people are real pale and some people are real dark, but everyone on the planet is brown, even people with albinism. Beige is a shade of brown. A white sand beach is a shade of brown, a fact that white sea gulls prove when they land.
On a tour of the Hosanna House in Wilkinsburg the other day, development director Gloria Nelson took me into the childhood development center where I saw a poster on the wall -- a chart of kids' names, a smudge of color and a food name beside each one.
The poster read "My skin is the color ..." and had 14 names and six colors to choose from -- chestnut, gingerbread, cinnamon, toast, ebony, peach.
It was particularly thrilling to see that African-American children were exploring this idea, just as I had done with a cluster of white and black friends a few years back.
LaNica Rodgers, a lead teacher in one of two preschools at Hosanna House, said each year's preschoolers do activities on the theme of "We are the same, we are different."
"We revisit the theme at the end of the school year," she explained, "to teach the kids who are going off to kindergarten that they will meet all kinds of people when they leave the walls of Hosanna House."
Ms. Rodgers said she wants the children to go into the world feeling great about who they are and exuding that sense to other kids who might not have gotten the message.
"We all put our arms out and we swabbed the multicultural paint colors to find the one that was the closest match for each child," she said.
Most multicultural paint colors are named after foods. My friends had also chosen their skin tones from the food groups, as I had done.
One friend decided she was chicken broth with a little raspberry thrown in. Others chose caramel, Cheerios, walnuts, whole-grain rice, amber ale, uncooked chicken skin and a hamburger bun-blood orange combo.
How fun and liberating it was to share this recognition that for all our variations we have brown in common. And this was what was so exciting -- if the greater society were to enjoy all of our shades the way we enjoy caramel, peaches and gingerbread, we might begin to migrate toward each other.
No doubt when the black/white designations began being used, it was a sweet way for the ruling class to keep us from seeing any chance to accomplish that unity. We bought into these distinctions, but we can reject them, too. How much sense does it make being represented by two noncolors that are on opposite ends of the spectrum?
We can still argue about things and celebrate cultural differences, but brown has the possibility of bringing us together. If we began to evolve emotionally as a society toward brown, I wonder how the talk-radio folks who devote entire shows to parsing the trends in the black vote, the white vote, etc., would handle it.
I wonder: Would the police and callers to 911 become more observant and precise in describing suspects once we decide we are all brown?
First Published: June 5, 2012, 8:00 a.m.
Updated: June 5, 2012, 2:30 p.m.
