Ch. 8: To All the White Girls I’ve Loved Before
Forget Marcia. I had a thing for Jan.
“In this country, what we call education is actually indoctrination, and it takes us from the age of 5 to the age of 18 to thoroughly indoctrinate people so that they will believe in the myth of white superiority.”
~ Jane Elliott, Red Table Talk
Are there any memories more profound for a teen boy, or a man — or an even older man writing a memoir — than the memories of the girls or women he saw on television for whom he pined and had crushes as a child? For many young boys, those will be their first “loves.”
Too young to realize that the paragons of beauty they’re seeing on screen are not real, we are at a very early age taught about what society says is beauty, perfection, and the standards by which every girl (or woman) is judged in real life.
As someone who engaged in television viewing at a very early age, I have a rather long list of pixie manic dream girls who captured my heart from behind the red, green, and blue pixels of my CRT TVs.
My earliest memory was Darla, from the Little Rascals. As Alfalfa and Porky battled for her…
