Have faith in your dreams and someday your rainbow will come smiling through. No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing the dream that you wish will come true.
I don’t know if many of you have been perusing the theatre arts news, but this past Tuesday Keke Palmer debuted in her role as Broadway’s first black Cinderella and I am beyond ecstatic. A few pictures of her performance appeared on my dash of her in tears as she received a standing ovation and I too was almost in tears from how happy I was to see a black woman, the same age and color as me to be doing this. She later tweeted “Dreams do come true,” and I wonder how much this will impact little girls who are the same color as me when they see her show or hear about her doing this.
Lately I’ve been feeling a little discomfort with Disney and their total disregard of the fact that they have a much wider and diverse audience than young white girls. Sure there’s Tiana, Mulan, Pocahontas, and a couple of others, but one main character of each race in comparison to the multitude of main white characters has become increasingly more difficult to recognize.
Now, I understand that Disney is not Broadway, and that this is Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. But I get so tired of seeing the typical argument that because a story originated in some European country that the retelling of it must have European characters because “it would be weird” or historically inaccurate…as if there aren’t variations of that same story all around the world in different language.
Perhaps this is because I grew up watching HBO Family’s Happy Ever After which would take traditional fairy tales and incorporate them into different cultures around the world so that the viewers could see their stories from a different perspective. Overall this show was always well done and always something that I looked forward to as a young girl. In fact, the first time I was ever introduced to “The Snow Queen” was this episode, and as you can clearly see, they had no problem incorporating people of color into this traditionally Danish story.
Further more, this is not the only example where I’ve been introduced to fairy tales from a POC perspective before a white perspective either— I had Roger’s and Hammerstein’s Cinderella starring Brandy, Whitney Houston and Bernadette Peters. I had Cendrillon: A Caribbean Cinderella. I had a story about Rapunzel that was about a girl in West Africa—and no, she didn’t have a weave as so many people are inclined to think is the requirement for such a thing to happen. I think something a lot of people forget about stories is that they travel and adapt to the people who encounter them. There is no such thing as a stagnant story. They change and take shape as each person experiences them.
I have a couple of friends who insist that representation doesn’t matter, but they can’t even begin to fathom what it’s like to grow up seeing people who look like you painted as unsuccessful and lazy and never as the strong and empowered characters that so many other people get the privilege to see. I did not grow up with white princesses as my only role models and I feel empowered and like I can do almost anything, and yet still occasionally struggle to remember that there are virtually no obstacles for myself except me. There are little black girls who don’t see examples of black women or characters doing anything and everything, and those girls are sometimes conditioned to thinking that because of that, they can’t be a princess, that they can’t be an actress, that they can’t rule the world, that they can’t do anything and everything. That is why seeing women like Keke Palmer, women like Kerry Washington, women like Lupita N’yongo in the media is important. That is why seeing and boosting black excellence is so damn important. We can’t continue to sweep these successes under the table—our future generation depends on it.
TJ Digital Creative 