Writing the Self 2: Crayola Markers

One day, in my grade ten year of high school, I was scrolling through the Instagram application on my phone. My friends were around me and we were laughing at all of the posts under the ‘explore’ tab. As we were sitting in our homeroom class, eating food as we did every Friday, our teacher asked what we could have been laughing at.

“Oh, just some stuff on the internet,” one of my friends explained to her. As I continued to scroll through the pictures that were popular on the internet, I came across one with a box of Crayola markers called “skin tones”. The title read “Crayola finally made a marker of my skin colour! Where was this during my childhood?” The title had a couple of emoticons that portrayed aggravation. I sat for a moment, thinking What? Crayola has always had my skin colour. Sure the quality was bad and the marker would dry out after colouring one person, but they always had it in the marker packages I would get my mother to buy every year for school in elementary. The package of markers had more than just my skin tone, though. I looked around at my classmates and actually focused on how different we looked from each other. I had always noticed the difference in skin colour between my friends and I but never realized that their was never a marker to match their skin colours. After all these years of drawing my white family with a white skin coloured marker, I had never realized that other people did not have a colour to match their skin. That is when I realized that others not only have other skin colours than I do, despite comparing tans every first day of school, but also that my skin colour was prioritized. It also had occurred to me that as I got older, there were more people in my life that were not white compared to when I was younger.