“All the Pretty Mermaids: Racist Narratives in Entertainment for Children”
“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.”
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 (and 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.
Later, 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 “the seduction of inadequacy” - 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: “Oscar Nominee Lupita Nyong’o Speech on Black Beauty Essence Magazine Black Women In Hollywood Award”; “You can’t ignore racism and raise anti-racist children. You have to tackle it head-on”
