They were trying to be helpful — Spain’s postal service, Correos — when, on May 25, they issued a set of four new postage stamps purporting to reflect various skin colors among the Spanish population.
“The darker the stamp, the less value it will have,” stated the state-owned company, in a news release announcing the launch. “Therefore, when making a shipment, it will be necessary to use more black stamps than white ones. That way, each letter and each shipment will become a reflection of the inequality created by racism.”
A black stamp was worth .70 cents in the company’s online shop, while a stamp in the lightest skin color was priced at 1.60 euros. On its Twitter account, the postal service said its campaign was aimed at raising awareness about “an unfair and painful reality that should not exist.”
I suppose Correos had good intentions, when they valued the stamps at dramatically different amounts. But thousands of Twitter users criticized the campaign upon its launch, calling it tone-deaf or “accidentally racist”… with many commenters expressing surprise that a government-run service would approve such a project.
That anyone would be surprised by a government decision… well, I find that surprising. I’ve always believed that governments were invented, for the express purpose of making the rest of us appear intelligent. Regardless of how many euros we were worth.
When I compared my own skin color to the four Spanish stamps, I found that I was valued at somewhere between .80 cents and 1.50 euros. I suppose that’s what I get, for living in sun-drenched Pagosa Springs and developing something of a tan. Maybe if I stayed inside during the daylight hours, and went out only at night, I could aim for 1.60 euros? But my friends might worry that I was sick, if I got that pale.
I had a few suggestions for the folks at Correos, to help defuse the situation, but as it turned out, the state-run company canceled sales of the stamps just three days after the campaign’s launch. I wasn’t able to learn how many millions of printed stamps will now be run through in the company’s paper shredder.
One of my suggestions was to include a reddish-colored stamp, to symbolize the beet-red face of a Twitter user who has become totally outraged over the postal campaign. Of course, we’d probably need four different shades of beet-red, to make things equitable, and that would simply play into the same controversy.
Diversity is a wonderful thing, just as racism is a horrible thing — and I can personally understand why certain progressive groups in Spain had encouraged Correos to proceed with this project.
But could the campaign have been formulated differently… so that it had no racist overtones, and generated no backlash?
I believe it could.
If Correos had simply produced a single stamp, that looked something like this:
I mean, isn’t that the actual situation?
That we’re all various shades of the same color, and have the same intrinsic worth?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.