Skin Tone

The past summer my Mexican passport expired and I went to the consulate to renew it. After handing in the required documentation, they made me sit in an office with a bored beaurocrat who handed me a form to fill in. One of the questions set me aback:

It asks the color of your skin. The options are:

  • Light brown
  • Brown
  • Black
  • White
  • Yellow
  • Pink[ish]

—“I’m not sure how to answer this question, what skin tone do you think I am?”, I asked, hoping to get a conversation started on why this was even asked if it doesn’t appear on the passport.

–“just tick whatever you identify more with”, he answered with without taking his eyes off the monitor, with a tinge of annoyance. He surely wanted to be done with me as soon as possible to get back to playing minesweeper on his legacy Windows desktop, and I knew my grudge wasn’t against him personally, so I didn’t press further.

In Mexico your skin tone has social connotations that go beyond your visual appearance, so ticking these boxes feels more like placing yourself in the social hierarchy rather than describing your visual appearance. And, as the answer is utterly useless and subjective, the first inclination is to protest.

But I knew it would be of no use. I ticked off pink[ish], in part because I was slightly sunburned from the hot Spanish summer, but mostly because I could not shake the feeling I was making a hierarchy assessment otherwise. I went back home and stared myself for a long time in the mirror.

Why was this question so difficult to answer? Hy hair and eyes are light brown, for sure, I have no trouble identifying that. But I look in the mirror and I don’t see a white person, even though most people in Mexico would identify me as white. But I was in Spain, and here I would be a bit “moreno”, and in Canada (my country of birth), I’d be tanned white dude.

It is impossible to describe skin tone without resorting to an implicit context. Should a truly white or yellow person show up to renew his passport, they’d probably suggest seeing a doctor instead. I’ve seen Spanish people bake themselves to brown in the sun, yet nobody would describe them as “marrón” (brown). We say people turn red, but if that really happened I’d surely think he’s being possessed by the devil.