Band-Aids and crayons for darker skin colors aren’t ‘woke’ — they’re just realistic | Opinion

Ah, Twitter — where some of the worst ideas reach millions of sets of eyes around the world, when they never should have crawled out of anyone’s mind in the first place. That’s what happened this week when popular comedian, podcaster and left-wing provocateur John Fugelsang — with almost half a million followers — replied to a misguided complaint from a little-known account, subjecting it to vastly more attention than it would have gotten on its own.

The tweet showed a photo of two boxes of Ourtone Band-Aids. “’OurTone?’ Really?” it asked incredulously. “Woke bandages: #ThisIs2023.” The presumed offense? The Ourtone line comes in three colors — “in shades for Black & Brown skin tones,” in manufacturer Johnson & Johnson’s words.

Liberal Twitter pounced, no surprise, furiously condemning the original poster. Many mocked her profile describing herself as a “Christ follower,” when an old-fashioned light beige Band-Aid would look jarring on the brown Middle Eastern skin of the actual Jesus of Nazareth.

The online mob calling for heads to roll is usually counterproductive. But here, some more level-headed critics merely asked the tweeter to show a little empathy: Maybe she could understand that the ability to cover up an ugly scraped knuckle or embarrassing pimple discreetly and unobtrusively is something light-skinned people have always taken for granted. Bandages for a range of skin colors simply extend that to a broader swath of humanity.

Multiple commercials in the classic “I am Stuck on Band-Aid” campaign make the point themselves: Videos uploaded to YouTube show cute kids singing the catchy jingle (written by Barry Manilow) as they show off their bandages to the camera. In the fuzzy vintage analog images, the Band-Aids are invisible on white skin, but they stand out distinctly on darker elbows and knees.

“Convenient flesh color, eh?” the white character Michael Binkley asks his Black friend Oliver Wendell Jones in a Jan. 4, 1989, “Bloom County” comic, as Oliver sports a stark, light Band-Aid on his forehead. The next day’s strip shows Oliver drawing a self-portrait for his mother. He asks Michael to pass him the “flesh” colored crayon. Seeing its bright hue, he hands it back: “I’ll trade ya for a ‘burnt umber.’”

“Bloom County” was actually behind the times itself. All the way back in 1962, years before it became part of Kansas City’s Hallmark, the Crayola company changed the name of its “flesh” crayon that came in its original assortment of 64 colors to “peach.” Today, Hallmark has a hit with its Colors of the World markers, pencils and crayons, which were named 2021 Creative Toy of the Year by trade group The Toy Association.

Ourtone Band-Aids aren’t even new (they debuted in 2021), nor are they the first of their kind. In 1998, Michael Panayiotis’ Ebon-Aide bandages hit the market in four colors. They weren’t a success, but they paved the way for others like them. But even in 2023, designers are still learning we have a way to go toward making all products suitable for the wide variety of human colors, shapes and sizes.

Until shockingly recent years, women took a backseat to men when it came to safety in the car. Men have long dominated the field of automotive engineering, and when the industry first starting testing with crash test dummies, they were modeled after the average height and weight of an adult male. It wasn’t until just 11 years ago that the first crash test dummy specifically simulating the female body was created.

These are all examples of institutional bias in action. We all tend to think about people and objects we’re familiar with as the default, as “normal.” When you’ve never looked down at the Band-Aid on the back of your hand and seen a distracting contrast, it can be difficult to internalize that yes, such a seemingly little thing really could matter to someone else.

It’s hardly “woke” when a massive conglomerate such as Johnson & Johnson expands a basic product line to appeal to a larger set of consumers. But this week’s Twitter piling-on is a sad reminder that to a certain segment of the population, trying to bring more people inside the tent feels like pushing those already inside out. That isn’t the goal of diversity, which should be about making everyone feel part of the same family — the human one.