I am not WHITE, I am not BLACK!

Music in this video:
Song ~ Jesus Loves the Little Children
Artist ~ Sing Hosanna
Album ~ Hymns For Kids
Licensed owned by ~ [Merlin] Evolution Limited; Evolution Media (UK) Ltd., ASCAP

If you would like to know your Pantone Skin tone number, email a JPG and PNG picture of the back of your hand and forearm to kennyhoward@icloud.com . When it is ready, I will send you a PayPal request for payment of US$2.50 and email you the result.​

Below is a transcript of the video...

Hi, my name is Ken Howard. I am an Australian toy and game developer and manufacturer. Over the years, I have developed thousands of products and manufactured millions. My work involves making, designing, and developing all sorts of things from plastic and electronic toys to board games to action figures, dolls, jigsaw puzzles and now apps so that they are able to interact with toys and games.

With all the talk going on about race and colour, I just want to throw in my two cents worth.

But first, when I talk COLOUR, I am talking about something completely different from what some racist stereotypes refer to.

We’ve all been down to the hardware store to pick the right pain colour to repaint our bedroom or lounge area. We might decide on something with a blue tone, so we will grab some blue swatches to take home and try around the room, to see if which blue fits in with the décor.

You know your printer at home, it uses four ink cartridges, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. From these four colours we can print all the colours of the rainbow. The same with the magazine on your side table. Take a magnifying glass and you will see the four different coloured dots, cyan, magenta, yellow and black, printed on a giant printing press like this, just like your one at home but more complex.

The thing is, these colours and tones are lying to you. You are not seeing these at all. The cones in your eyes and the pixels in your computer monitor use a different colour system of red, green, and blue. To make brown on your printer, your graphic’s program will use zero % cyan, 60% magenta, about 50% yellow and 40% black. But to make brown with red, green, and blue, is actually very very hard.

As designers we use conversion programs to switch between RGB and CMYK. When we prepare artwork for printing or manufacture, we use CMYK and when we prepare graphics which will only be used on a monitor or a tablet or phone, we use only RGB.

This creates huge problems matching the colours up on the screen, to samples we show printed for clients. Plus, no two monitors in the world show the same colours. Plus, everyone’s eyes are like fingerprints, no two people see the exact same colour.

To overcome this for printing we use the Pantone system. This is a company that verifies the colours on every printer in the world and so everyone buys a swatch from them. These swatches show the percentage of each Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black to put in the artwork. So, the artists design in Australia will match exactly what is printed on the machine in Germany, for example.

Do you remember that Sunday School song: “Jesus loves the little children of the world”? Just listen to it for a moment.

Now that you understand a little bit about colour and tone, let me introduce you to the BROWN spectrum.

Pantone actually makes a skin TONE swatch in the BROWN spectrum.

So, when I am designing a doll or action figure, first we start with a photo shoot. Like we did for this South American Wrestler, who wanted his own action figure.

First I match the Wrestler’s clothes with the Pantone colour swatch, then I use the Pantone skin tone swatch to match his skin tone. Notice I use the word TONE NOT COLOUR.

As you will see soon, the whitest albino and the darkest east African, still fall within the BROWN tonal range of the skin tone colour spectrum.

Whether it is Mattel or Hasbro for Barbie or Fisher Price, we all use the Pantone Skin tone swatch to match the brown tone to the model of the character.

Pantone even proved the point, in an advertising campaign, by combining people with the exact same facial features but with different skin tones, to create this guy’s multi-tonal image.

Before migration, due to the introduction of the train and then air travel, you can trace native skin tones to where people needed more melanin protection from the sun than those in artic regions.

It’s proven that children are more accepting of others who are different from themselves. Racism is LEARNT and TAUGHT.

A few years ago, I started a campaign of saying TONE NOT COLOUR. At the same time, working with Pantone, Angelica Bass started her Ted Talks “I am not Black. I am not White. I am not Yellow”.

Society has even changed in recent years featuring models with Vitiligo.

Angelica then chose participants from around the world and photographed them with backgrounds that had the exact same pantone number as their skin tone.

Take a moment to embrace and take in these beautiful people.