CULTURE WATCH : Peachy Keen

Caucasians, in case you haven’t noticed, are not refrigerator white. Africans aren’t telephone black. American Indians are not cherry red. Asians are not lemon yellow. What color are we all?

Try “mahogany, peach, tan, sepia, burnt sienna and apricot,” which, along with classic black and white, fill Crayola’s new “Skin Tones of the World” crayon box. “Flesh” as a crayon color has apparently been retired, and we think it’s about time.

Since well before the founding of the republic, American culture has operated on the absurd assumption that though half-black was black, half-white was not white. The truth may always have leapt to the eye. If your mother was mahogany and your father peach, you yourself were likely to be something of a mahogany peach. Alas, the American mind taught the American eye not to see. That’s what racism is all about.

And that’s why, in a day when good news in race relations is scarce, Crayola’s new skin-tone box is good news indeed. A generation ago, the thought that a coffee-colored man and his cream-colored wife--Justice and Mrs. Clarence Thomas--would appear on television as the favorites of, hang on, Southern conservatives would have astounded the nation. It does so no longer, and we’re glad to see coloring-book conservatives loosening up as well.

To date, we confess, we have yet to meet an apricot-colored human being, but in the era of the lightening agent and the tanning salon, nothing is impossible. Black and white together, peach and tan together, we shall overcome.