Lydia Diamond's "Stick Fly"

I just read Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond, a play about an elite African American family getting together at their summer home in Martha's Vineyard. She has an exquisite ear for dialogue. These lines are from a scene where they're talking about a young man's new girlfriend, who has not yet arrived:

Kent: Yeah, Flip's girl is a little melanin challenged.

Cheryl: Melanin challenged? ... [just getting it]  Oh, she white?

Kent and Flip: She's Italian.

The joke is that is that the olive-skinned are seen
as somehow in-between,
not black, but a bit off-white.

And the young men hope that will make it all right
with their mother
who will be upset if the girl is too... other.