Lucretia Carter Berry, PhD • April 29, 2026
Most books hand children a narrative. Hues of You hands them a pencil. The learning happens in the doing — tracing, naming, drawing, imagining. Every activity was designed to meet children where child development research says they already are: curious, concrete, sensory, and actively building their sense of who they are in the world.
We are a rich, varied, gorgeous story of humanity — and we look the part. The full range of how we look, the undertones, the textures, the features passed down through generations — is far more layered and beautiful than Black, White, Asian, or any other racial category can hold. Children know this. They are already observing it. What they often lack is language, and permission. Permission to see. Permission to name. Permission to celebrate what they notice without shame or silence or someone quickly changing the subject.
Hues of You tries to give them that. Let me take you inside a few pages.
Name Your Hue
One of the first activities asks children to draw a self-portrait. Right next to it is the invitation to name their own skin tone — not to accept whatever label the world has handed them, but to choose something personal, positive, and true. Something pulled from nature, food, spices, precious metals — anything that feels good.
In my family of five, we have five different hues of brown. I have a lot of active melanin with a bronze-golden undertone, so I named my skin mocha bronze. My husband Nathan has less active melanin and named his light olive. Our daughters chose peanut butter cookie dough, golden caramel, and cinnamon spice. Notice what we reached for: nature, spice, food, warmth. Words that are happy, positive, and affirming.
That is not accidental. It is a direct response to something real.
I think about Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop every time a child sits with this page. Bishop introduced the concept of books as mirrors and windows — a mirror reflects the reader’s own experiences and identity back to them, a window offers a view into someone else’s world. Hues of You is designed to be both. But it starts with the mirror. Bishop wrote that when children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted or negative, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.
The self-portrait page refuses that lesson. You are the subject. You are worth drawing carefully. And you — not a crayon manufacturer, not a racial category assigned by law, not anyone else — get to decide what to call what you see.
This is not just a creative exercise. Research shows that children as young as three begin to notice differences in skin color, hair texture, and other physical characteristics, and can start to express racial biases and preferences at that age. By the time many children first hold this book, they have already absorbed messages about which skin tones are beautiful and which are not. Naming is a way of pushing back. When a child writes “golden caramel” and means themselves, they are doing something small that is actually enormous. They are placing their own authority over the meaning of their body before the world gets a chance to do it for them.
And here is the deeper truth: racial categories tell us how we are grouped. They do not tell us how we actually look. Black and White are not colors of skin. They are social and legal constructs — invented to create a hierarchy. Every single person’s skin contains melanin, a brown pigment, which means every skin tone is literally a hue of brown. More melanin means more brown. Less melanin means less brown. Undertones of gold, peach, pink, blue — those come from beneath the surface and create the extraordinary variation we actually see when we look at each other.
Giving children this truth, and the words to hold it, is the beginning of racial literacy. Not a lecture. A pencil. A blank face on a page. And a question: what beautiful hue would you call this?
Hair Is Not a Small Thing
Children are invited to identify their hair texture, learn the biology of the hair follicle, and connect what grows from their own head to what they may have inherited across generations.
I included it because hair carries weight — and because curiosity about hair, left without language or boundaries, causes real harm.
Here is what happens on playgrounds every day. A child with coily or curly hair walks into a room and another child reaches out to touch it — sometimes without a word, sometimes with “can I feel it?” said while their hand is already moving. The child with coily hair has learned to brace for this. The child reaching has not been taught that this is a boundary violation. Neither of them has been given the language or the framework to handle this moment with care.
Touching a Black person’s hair without permission can be a violation of personal space and an invasion of bodily autonomy — a form of microaggression that can lead to further isolation, discomfort, and ridicule, especially for Black children. And yet it happens constantly, often by well-meaning children and adults who simply do not know better because no one has ever taught them better.
The hair pages in Hues of You are designed to close that gap — for everyone in the room.
Children are naturally curious about what is different from what they know. That curiosity is good and healthy. The goal is never to suppress it. The goal is to redirect it from hands to minds. When a child has already learned about hair follicles — about how a flatter, more oval follicle produces coily and curly hair while a rounder follicle produces straight hair — they have something to do with their curiosity that does not require touching another child’s body. They can wonder about it. They can ask a question, respectfully, from a respectful distance. They can recognize that the variation is biological, beautiful, and worth understanding — not a novelty to be handled.
The pages also address something that adults often stumble over. Without the right language, adults default to “good hair” and “bad hair,” or they sort texture into racial categories — Black hair, white hair — as if hair texture belongs to a race rather than to a person and their ancestry. Also, the racially motivated devaluing of coily hair textures places a specific burden on Black girls and women — a burden that is reinforced, unintentionally but consistently, every time an adult reaches for straight hair as the default and standard.
Hues of You gives children and adults better words. Coily. Curly. Wavy. Straight. Follicle. Inheritance. These are accurate, affirming, and available to everyone. And alongside biology comes something just as important: the reminder that every body belongs to its person. Curiosity is welcome. Consent is required.
Where Your Skin Tone Comes From
In the book, children learn that their skin tone is not random. It is a letter from their ancestors.
Ancestors with deep brown hues most likely lived in sunny, hot regions close to the equator, where more active melanin was needed to protect against intense UV exposure. Ancestors with olive or medium brown tones lived in the middle regions, where the climate varied. Ancestors with fair or pale hues most likely lived far from the equator, in colder regions where less melanin allowed more sunlight absorption for vitamin D. The level of melanin in your skin is, in part, a record of where your people lived and what they needed to survive.
Children are invited to look at a map, find where their distant ancestors may have come from based on their skin tone, color those regions, and imagine what their ancestors looked like. They are asked: do you currently live where your distant ancestors lived? If not — how did your family’s story travel from there to here?
This is where biology and belonging meet. And it does something important that a racial category cannot. Race tells a child they are Black or White or Asian. This tells a child their body carries a geographic memory. Their melanin is inherited wisdom. Their skin tone is a sign of where their people were and how they endured.
For a child who has been handed, implicitly or explicitly, the message that darker skin is less desirable — learning that the amount of melanin in their skin is an adaptation their ancestors developed in relationship with the sun — is not a small thing. It reframes the whole story. And it opens a door to the larger conversation. That is a migration story. And if skin tone is biological — if it is simply the record of where your people traveled and what they needed — then race, the system of status placed on top of it, was invented. It was a choice someone made. Which means it can be challenged.
Children do not need that full analysis at age six. But the seed can be planted. That is what these pages are for.
Words to Know
Throughout Hues of You, small glossary boxes appear alongside the activities. Skin tone. Hue. Melanin. Pigment. Culture. Follicle. Ancestor. Race. Ethnicity. Nationality.
Language is never neutral.
At Hues of You Summer Camp, one of the things we teach every session is the difference between four words that most people use interchangeably — and shouldn’t. Race. Culture. Ethnicity. Nationality. Four distinct social identities. Four different stories about who we are.
When we started talking about nationality, an elementary aged, camper of Indian descent – bright, curious, engaged – kept associating “American” with white people and “African-American” with Black people. This is what the world had taught him — through media, through casual language, through the way these words get used and misused so consistently that the misuse starts to feel like the definition.
It took him a couple of days. We kept returning to it, gently. American is a nationality. It describes every citizen of the United States — every single one, regardless of how they are racialized. White is a racial category, not a nationality. African-American describes a racial and cultural identity. Slowly, something shifted. By the end of camp he could say it clearly and mean it: everyone who is a citizen is American. White is not a synonym for American. That is not a small thing for a child to untangle. It is, in fact, the exact kind of thinking that holds racism in place when it goes unexamined.
That is why the four words matter.
Race is the grouping system society imposed on people based on physical appearance — primarily skin color. It is a social and legal construct, not a biological reality. It was invented, and it has been used to assign status, opportunity, and harm.
Ethnicity is the shared cultural heritage a person identifies with — the traditions, history, language, and ancestry of a group. Two people can be the same race and have entirely different ethnicities. Two people can share an ethnicity and look nothing alike.
Culture is the living, breathing set of practices, values, foods, languages, and stories that a community shares and passes down. It changes over time. It is not fixed, and it is not the same as race.
Nationality is the country you are from or a citizen of. It says nothing about how you look, what your ancestry is, or which cultural community you belong to.
Children who have these four words have a tool kit. They can push back on “but what are you really?” They can understand why sorting cultural practices into racial boxes — “that’s a Black thing,” “that’s a white thing” — flattens something that is actually far richer. They can hold the truth that a person can be Nigerian and American, Afro-LatinÓ and Catholic, mixed-ancestry and fully rooted — all at once.
Words help shape a child’s identity and experiences, and they are the mechanism with which children express themselves. When we leave children without language for these distinctions, we leave them inside the oversimplified categories the world handed them. When we give them precise language, we give them the ability to see themselves and each other more honestly.
We cannot see and honor what we have no words to hold. These glossary boxes are not just definitions. They are invitations — to a more honest, more generous, more beautiful way of seeing each other.
Why This Approach Works
Each of these activities is grounded in three things: what child development research says about how children build identity and understand difference, what antiracism education says about what children actually need to disrupt harmful messages, and what I have witnessed in real rooms with real children over more than twenty years of work.
Children are already observing our multi-hued world. They notice. They wonder. They ask the questions adults are sometimes afraid to answer. What they need are adults willing to sit with them in that noticing — with accurate words, with science, with the kind of affirming curiosity that says: your body is remarkable, your story matters, and so does your neighbor’s.
We are so much more than the categories we’ve been sorted into. Hues of You Learning Experiences — the activity book, the PLAYshops, and the summer camp — invites children to discover that for themselves — one page, one question, one beautifully named hue at a time. Hues of You: An Activity Book for Learning About the Skin You Are In is published by WaterBrook/Penguin Random House and available wherever books are sold. For school and group bulk orders, email connect@brownicity.com.
Lucretia Carter Berry, PhD, is a distinguished author, educator, and speaker, as well as the visionary founder of Brownicity, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering education designed to inspire a culture of true belonging and justice for all. Lucretia was also a valued contributor to incourage.me, where she shared her insights and wisdom on topics of faith, resilience, and personal growth. Through her books, Teaching for Justice and Belonging – A Journey for Educators and Parents (2022), Hues of You – An Activity Book for Learning About the Skin You Are In (2022), and What LIES Between Us – Fostering First Steps Toward Racial Healing (2016), her impactful TED Talk, and her commitment to building just communities, Lucretia encourages meaningful engagement that transcends boundaries, fostering personal development, resilience, and the transformative capacity within each of us.
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