Angélica Dass

Angelica Dass made me think until I realized that, just as there are micromachisms around us every day of our lives, there are also “microracisms.” The fact that there is the color “flesh” among the variety of colors is one of them and is that, who said that was the “normal” color to give color to the drawings that represent person? In my view, all this comes from the need to label everything. It is true that sometimes giving a generic name to something is good and even necessary because it tells us what it represents, but not everything can be classified.

We already have different vocabulary to differentiate the different ranges of colors that exist (blue: turquoise blue, navy blue, light blue...), why can’t the same thing exist to describe the different shades of skin?

All this would not be so important if each of us meditated on how someone with a PANTONE 58-3 C skin tone differs from someone with PANTONE 319-7 C.

The fact of being born with one skin or another is a matter of genetics, but the fact of being a better person or a worse person depends on yourself, something that can be judged because that person is the one who has built that out of him. It’s the same as if we put ourselves in the situation where the light eyes reject the dark eyes by the simple fact that the dark colors are worse than the light ones. We have assumed the variety of eye color that exists but not of skin, making this a burden for some people who suffer rejection and violence because of their genetic inheritance.

We tend to pigeonhole people because of their skin color, height or physical shape, devaluing them simply because we believe that the profile we have is the right one, the one that should exist. But who dictates what is normal, what is right or who deserves to live in peace with the condition in which he was born? It is not fair that someone who is born happy with the way he is, has to lead his life with the rejection of society for not following its rules.

This is why Angelica Dass, adding rejection after rejection and collecting all the derogatory comments towards her skin tone and that of her family, decided to create this project. A project in which it shows us all that not everything is as we think we see, there are thousands of things out there that we will not be able to name simply because of the immensity it encompasses, and that we will have to live with them without discriminating what is not the most numerous or what is different from what we have.

STANDARD is the word that must begin to be carried out in the classroom. That’s why I want to share here the project called “HUMANAE” that Angelica Dass carried out through a collection of photos of people from different parts of the world and with different skin tones. The pictures show these people with their skin tone in the background and with the name of that tone “PANTONE _____.”

With the little ones you can work through their self-portrait. Not only will we stick to the drawing they make, we will also give them several colors: white, red, black and yellow, which are wrongly associated with races. In this way you will be aware that no skin tone is exactly the same because you will experience while reflecting.