"As a little girl, I was proud of my natural hair. It was fashioned into cornrows, or formed into dreadlocks, and for years I felt like my hair was beautiful. It all changed when I became a regular viewer of children’s television, watching Walt Disney movies like they were going out of style, and unknowingly damaging my perception of myself as a pre-adolescent. As a child, I immediately noticed that the princesses and heroines didn’t look like me, did not have dreadlocks or brown skin. Heck, they didn’t look like many of the kids I knew (I live in Hawaii). Suddenly, I didn’t feel so pretty and I quickly realized that I could never look like any of the princesses, fairies, mermaids, or nymphs that I had come to love. I suddenly realized that they were considered beautiful and I was not...
Even with my mother telling me how beautiful I was with my brown skin, thick hair, and full mouth, I did not believe her. It didn’t matter that God had made us varied and unique. All the princesses were white."
http://blackgirlnerds.com/pretty-mermaids-racist-narratives-entertainment-children/
There is so much here that is important and true. Growing up in the 90s, I also was totally immersed in disney and formed my idea of beauty based on those princesses. I distinctly remember the understanding that I had all through elementary school, that beauty was long-straight-golden-hair and blue-eyes-with-thick-lashes and clear-fair-white-skin and thin, long bodies.
In the way that children learn the world first as a series of rules, I knew that I would never be among the beautiful, just like fish don't walk; maybe I could be pretty (i.e. acceptable for a background character), if I was "good" and someone taught me the rules and I tried to look like, say, Tia Mowry on Sister, Sister (by the way, it took me until high school to realize that the reason I found Tia to be prettier that Tamera was Tia's straightened hair). This didn't bother me at all at the time; I didn't care about boys noticing me yet, and I was also absorbing the idea that intelligence and attractiveness were mutually exclusive.
In middle school at some point I realized that my understanding of my inherent ugliness was based on media and westernized ideas of beauty, but it was too late: I had already built this understanding of myself, I already had deep assumptions that boys would never be attracted to me, I was already deeply anxious about the idea of trying and failing to look nice. Like Lupita N'yongo said "**thing about mediocrity**" It wasn't until high school that I started to discover that I could sometimes like what I saw in the mirror, and that was okay.
Children's media really, really matters. I don't know that I will ever have a really healthy, measured relationship with my appearance or attractiveness (especially because I have all of the rest of the 90s/2000s crap about women's bodies thrown in the mix too). If I ever have children, it will be important for me to give them media that centers happy, growing, confident black children - and it will be important for me to find a place where their peers will also be familiar with those characters so that they are a real cultural element in their lives.
Related: Raising anti-racist children; Lupita speech
No comments:
Post a Comment