If I may, I’d like to chime in just for this point. I read Abe Lateiner’s piece and the part where his daughter describes her skin as cinnamon also stood out to me. Not because I haven’t heard it, but because it’s so common were I’m from.

I grew up in Cartagena, Colombia. We’ve got a pretty diverse population as far as skin tones go. The city was colonized by the Spanish and it was a major port for the slave trade, including both African and Indigenous populations. Over the years, as you can imagine, there’s a fair bit of mixing that takes place among these populations. There was also an influx of Arabs later, further adding to the diversity. Since we are a spectrum of all these different features and colors, a lot of us grow up using words like “trigeño, mestizo, mulato, negro, blanco” etcétera to describe our own skin and that of others.

One of the words often used to describe skin tone is canela — cinnamon. It is not unusual to hear very young children describe themselves and their friends in this way; it’s actually quite ‘normal’. Those words are part of our culture, part of our identity, they’re even in our songs. While I can accept that maybe your children do not use those words/descriptors to describe themselves, I just wanted to let it be known, that there are many children that do. And that doing so, while maybe not normal to you, is perfectly normal to us.