Daddy, Papa and Me

A recent AP article suggests that interracial marriages, and the children that come from them, has surged across the United States. While the population of the United States has increased by 50% since 1970 (from 200 to 300 million), the number of black-white marriages since 1970 has increased by 650% (from 65k to 422k). If you factor in all races, interracial married couples made up 2% of all couples in 1970. Today they make up over 7%, a more than 3-fold increase. That doesn’t tell the whole story about transracial and interracial families. The number of transracial adoptions has soared in the last few decades also.

What does this have to do with Cinderella?

Well, quite a lot.

I really dislike the ‘princess’ craze that permeates the mass media. This New York Times article sums up a lot of the reasons why.

My first reaction is to say “hey, I thought we overthrew a monarchy 200 years ago?” Then there is the entire “girls need to be saved by boys” thing (though Disney has drifted from that with ‘princesses’ like Mulan), girls are meek and mild thing.

But what I want to stress now is the princesses have to be white thing. Though again, Disney has tried to rectify that with Mulan, Pochahantas, Jasmine and has finally.. got around to introducing it’s first black princess. Of course the Daily Show has a funny take on that.

Some of the kids apparently didn’t get the ‘newer’ message though (and Disney still emphasizes the older..white.. princesses in it’s marketing). One of Emma’s friends once told Emma she couldn’t be a princess, after Emma saying something about wanting to be one, because she didn’t look like Snow White or Cinderella.. white. Ironic thing is, this girl was Asian.

In addition to this, there is the whole ’60’s’ musical obsession of our daughter’s. Emma loves them. She loves the music, the bigger-than-life acting, dancing, everything: Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady and even stretching back into the 30’s with the Wizard of Oz.

One small problem I thought: They are all so very very white. I always knew it, but it hit harder when are family became multi-racial. It wasn’t enough to stop us from watching them (heck, they have other ‘values’ problems), because.. hey.. they are good and fun.

We don’t discourage her watching these movies, but we wanted something to balance all this white princess mold. We don’t want Emma growing up thinking that “white women=good, kind, sweet, wonderful” and “black women= whatever Imus and Hip-hop stars like to say they are.”

Because frankly, that is what our media culture so overwhelmingly continues to portray, the media from Disney to Imus to Hip hop recording studios and so much else.

So lets get back to Cinderella.

We were discussing this with some friends a while back, they are parents of two wonderful kids in Emma’s school, and lamented the lack of good musicals for Emma to watch that weren’t ALL white.

The suggested Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella from 1997 and lent us their video copy.

This version of Cinderella is multi-racial. Cinderella is black, as is one of her mean step-sisters. Her step-mother is white. The prince is Asian (Filipino to be exact) and his mother is black (Whoppi Goldberg) and father is white. The fairy godmother is black, and so it goes.

So, we put it in the other day. Emma was mesmerized. She absolutely loved it.

And she did something that made me glad (in spite of all the princess indoctrination LOL) we got this for her. Out of pure serendipity, we had a Disney princess book that someone left at our house. A book about each of the princesses (except Mulan!?). Interestingly, it was one of the granddaughters of the woman who does Emma’s hair and came with her to our house. They are black. It permeates, this princess is white thing.

As we were about 10 minutes into the movie, Emma went and got the book. She looked up at me while pointing to Cinderella on the cover of the book and said:

“I thought Cinderella looked like this”

I answered that “Cinderella can look like anything we want her too. She’s pretend.”

Emma’s answer?

“Oh. That’s cool” and then went on to watch the movie. And then watch it again. and again.

She didn’t notice, or at least she didn’t mention, that the prince’s parents were both different colors than he was. Perhaps it’s because her family is that way, or the families of many, if not most, of her friends are that way.

It didn’t get past several reviewers of the movie in the Amazon link above though:

I wanted to add my two cents, here. I saw this movie when it first came on tv in the mid 90’s. I don’t remember it that well, but remember being stunned and horrified of such a multi-cultural cast. I agree with the reviewer who pointed out how odd it was and awkward it would have been to try to explain to your kids why the king is asian and his parents are both different races.

or this one

…how does one explain how a white King and a black queen have a sun that appears to be asian. The families should have been of one race. The prince can easily be a different race than Cinderella, but do not confuse kids and put parents in the awkard position of having to explain…

and so on.

My first reaction is a sarcastic one: “Oh the horrors of explaining mixed race families!!” What, these parents see pumpkins turn into carriages and fairy godmothers every day? Those aspects are infinitely more fantasy than a mixed-race family would be. Or have they never heard of _adoption_ or interracial marriage? Somehow I really have no sympathy for these parents having to explain to their children about mixed-race families.

And that brings us back to the stats I first posted. These parents are going to have to explain it a lot more as the number of interracial families surges and the number of transracial adoptions grow.

I’m glad this movie is out. It allowed my daughter to see that even black girls can be princesses.

Well, now we got to get that multi-racial musical where the princess doesn’t have to be saved by a prince .

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This entry was posted by Trey on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Movies, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.