By Karen Katz
A girl and her artist mother walk the neighborhood and discover that brown comes in a dozen delicious shades.
Seven-year-old Lena wants to paint a picture of herself and reaches for brown. Her mother, a painter, takes her for a walk instead, and block by block they name the browns all around them, Lena's own cinnamon skin, her friend Sonia's creamy peanut butter, Mr. Pellegrino's pizza-crust tan, Candy's peachy-pink, honey, coffee, chocolate, ginger. By the time they get home Lena has a whole palette, and she sits down to mix the exact colors of everyone she loves.
It turns skin color into something warm and specific and worth savoring, instead of something to be careful around. Every shade is a good thing, named like a treat. For a young class it's the gentlest possible way to open a conversation about why people look different, and it lands the idea that there's no single skin-color crayon, everyone is their own exact mix. Simple enough for the very youngest listeners to follow.