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Celebrate Diversity
Jan. 16th, 2012 11:02 pmSo, those of you who have found me on Facebook probably saw the photo I shared that originated, at least in my experience, from It's OK To Be Takei (or perhaps from George Takei). It's a line of crayons in various variants on brown, all labeled "flesh".
I want that set of crayons! (Actually, to be honest, I want that set of Prismacolors. I don't use crayons any more, the artist-quality colored pencils give much more satisfying results. But the principle is the same.)
Then I saw Google's logo for MLK day, which as usual is delightful. But I happened to hold my arm in front of it, and realized that (at least in the light of my tiny office) the color of Dr. King and the children in the logo--so obviously brown against the paper-white background on my computer screen--was barely darker than the color of my arm. (As you can see from my icon picture here, I'm very clearly not what anyone would consider "brown-skinned".)
This reminds me of my experiments with the skin colors on the time-wasting Sim game on Facebook, where there's a range of skin colors, nearly all of which look white to me when I'm not seeing the even whiter ones in the little window for choosing skin color. In reality, of course, there's lots of shades of dark skin, not just one or two.
These things served to remind me, on this Martin Luther King day, just how far we still have to go to properly include and celebrate all of the wonderful diversity of humanity in our art and literature.
I want that set of crayons! (Actually, to be honest, I want that set of Prismacolors. I don't use crayons any more, the artist-quality colored pencils give much more satisfying results. But the principle is the same.)
Then I saw Google's logo for MLK day, which as usual is delightful. But I happened to hold my arm in front of it, and realized that (at least in the light of my tiny office) the color of Dr. King and the children in the logo--so obviously brown against the paper-white background on my computer screen--was barely darker than the color of my arm. (As you can see from my icon picture here, I'm very clearly not what anyone would consider "brown-skinned".)
This reminds me of my experiments with the skin colors on the time-wasting Sim game on Facebook, where there's a range of skin colors, nearly all of which look white to me when I'm not seeing the even whiter ones in the little window for choosing skin color. In reality, of course, there's lots of shades of dark skin, not just one or two.
These things served to remind me, on this Martin Luther King day, just how far we still have to go to properly include and celebrate all of the wonderful diversity of humanity in our art and literature.
