While in grade school eons ago, I remember some lucky students having big boxes of crayons with an attached sharpener. I believe back then, the giant box held 64, while most of us had the lowly, 24 count version. Today, some boxes hold 152.
Teachers handed out mimeographed pages for us to color with the papers having a unique smell of their own. The ink on them was near hallucinogenic if enough of it was breathed. A hand-cranked mimeograph machine is much like a printing press. These archaic devices were used before copy machines came along.
While coloring the outlined pages having people and animals on them, I used black and brown for dark-skinned folks, and white for the rest of us. Of course, red could be an option for Native American Indians according to some racially insensitive western movies, yet I used brown instead.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never seen a red man like that deep red on my crayon except at the beach, and on Red Man chewing tobacco packets. With some groups considering the namesake to be offensive, in 2022, this product was renamed Best Chew.
Using white to color a Caucasian is what I did when “flesh” wasn’t available. Yes, flesh was a color in certain Crayola boxes. White never did justice to a picture and was sometimes hard to see. If anything, a character came out looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost, only paler. Because of that, I often tried to borrow flesh from one of the rich students.
Flesh only came in those big boxes, and I assumed the kid’s having them hailed from wealthy families. In 1962, Crayola discontinued the flesh name and labeled it peach, saying that the color wasn’t representative of all people’s skin. Duh. It’d take a magical Crayola to be able to do that.
Flesh didn’t resemble my skin tone whatsoever. It was more of a pale pink like a newly-born Caucasian baby’s behind. Caucasian was my ethnicity according to teachers and parents. Back then, the word sounded like some type of nomadic Native tribe and I was okay with such, not so much today.
Caucasian can stand for a multitude of things where race is concerned. It’s a bogus term adopted by the government to characterize all white people. Since that time, they’ve dropped the name in favor of “European.” A copout as well, because not all light-skinned humans are of European descent.
Getting back to Crayola’s and those big boxes. On one occasion, I attempted to sharpen a crayon in the class pencil sharpener—discovering that it wasn’t such a great idea. Crayola’s are made of wax, while trying to sharpen one is much like doing the same to a candle. The pencil sharpener hanging on our classroom wall was made unusable at this point, until my teacher tediously cleaned the rotating blades. Mrs. Wood informed me not to sharpen Crayola’s in it again.
By the end of a school year, most kids having the big boxes were down considerably in numbers. With students loaning them out to careless guys like me, this act of generosity resulted in a good many being lost, broken, or stolen.
The rest of us kids were in the same boat, yet on an entirely different level. Having just a minimal amount of colors left out of 24, we still used them, because what difference did it make at this point? Green, blue, or orange, the lifeless people we colored never complained once about our artwork. In fact, they’d probably laugh if they saw some of the unique renditions. I recall allowing my creativity to run wild, turning people and animals into multi-hued cartoon characters.
If I had life to do all over again, there are a couple of things I’d change for sure. One, is to somehow talk Dad and Mom into buying me one of those big boxes of Crayola’s. Kids having them were much higher on the class pecking order than those that didn’t. You could say they were “the in crowd” during those first three school years.
Secondly, I’d ‘never’ check another box marked Caucasian when filling out school forms, or any form for that matter. I’d randomly check a different block each time. I’ve been doing it for some time now with no repercussions, considering this to be a peaceful yet humorous protest. For the bulk of my life, I haven’t figured out why recipients of these forms need to know the ethnicity of an applicant to begin with.
Using black, brown, white, red, yellow, green, blue, and purple Crayola’s as examples—they all come out of the same box, and get along just fine. Why differentiate the skin color or ancestry of an applicant on applications, especially when applying for a job or bank loan. Aren’t we all created equal according to God?
I believe that forcing people to answer this type of invasive question regarding race, color, or creed on applications or forms, is the starting point for racism. It’s totally hypocritical that government is the first institution asking for such, on birth, census, and social-security records, while on the other hand, they constantly preach prejudice and bigotry as being wrong. Go figure.
I like to write junk... 