Red, Black, and Yellow?

"Longboat, Robert's hero, was an Indian. He ran the marathon. He won things. Then he smiled and was silent. Robert smiled and was silent, too. He'd go upstairs into the attic, when he was ten, and take off his clothes in front of an old, dark mirror and wished that he was red. Or black. Or yellow. Any colour but pink. Smiling and silence didn't seem to go with pink." p.47
At first, the colours made me think of Germany. However, I realized that the colours were referring to skin tone. Since the age of ten, Robert wanted to be different. To imitate his hero, he even went as far as to run twenty-six laps around his neighborhood, with his bare feet.
His mother went against his urge to run, but his father let him. This foreshadows the actions of each parent in the future. When Robert goes to war, his father writes and sees him to support him while his mother does not.