17 Global News Post 1

The Brazilian professor who created a crayon set to talk about identity and racial issues By Talita Fernandes and Edgar Velozo

This article features Gladis Kaercher, a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. Her focus lies mainly in discussions about ethnic-racial relations, and she has helped to foster dialogues about race in Brazil. Kaercher is especially aware of the racial inequity rife in Brazil–a country in which the majority of its citizens identify as Black.

Kaercher decided she wanted to change the scope of the conversation of race, and in her genius, she developed the idea of creating a box of crayons, each with an assortment of varying skin-toned colors. She remarked that in Brazil, the only skin-toned coloring tool was that of a light pink-peach color. This small detail, although seemingly innocuous, limits the imagination of young schoolchildren and their perceptions of an ideal skin color, when the only color at their fingertips belongs to a white-skinned individual.

The development of this box of crayons would revolutionize the issue of representation and identity at a young age and would not only grant children the ability to choose what color they want when illustrating a person, but also help to start a discussion that normalizes the need to talk about ethnic-racial relations.