Rachael Quinn Egan questions what kind of message kids are getting from entertainment that excludes people of color.
Dear fellow white liberal, parent:
You’re not a racist, but are you parenting nice kids with racist white conditioning?
Please let me explain.
I am a white Irish woman who grew up all over the world in places such as Egypt, Malaysia, and Ireland. Even though I saw the world, and always tried to be nice to everyone, I was afflicted by racist white conditioning. Adopting children of color kickstarted my recovery from that. Part of that recovery is this letter to you.
For many parents, there were two themes that dominated the summer of 2014 — our kids dancing around, singing the wonderful songs of the animated movie Frozen, and the unnecessary killing in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown, a young black man. What if I suggested to you that there was a connection between Frozen and Brown’s killing?
Entertainment like Frozen is conditioning you and me and our children to expect a white-washed world where people of color are ‘the other’. I know it’s hard to fight Hollywood, but did you talk to your children about how that movie did not fairly represent people of color?
When I think about the police officer who killed Michael Brown, I wonder how his parents raised him? To be fair, he was simply the guy who pulled the trigger; we all killed Michael Brown.
At its root, Brown was killed because being black in America is being ‘the other’. In Frozen, and too many of the movies that our kids and ourselves are influenced by, black people are not even the other; they are often not even represented. Now, many white folks might wrack their brains, thinking I am wrong, and might try to remember the black faces they saw in Frozen. Trust me, apart from a few guests at the ball who never appeared again, they are not there, certainly not in any valid way.
When I complain to my white friends about Frozen, and about movies such as How to Train Your Dragon 2, where all the characters were white (except for the bad guy) my white friends defend the movies with cries of “historical accuracy”. This is simply not accurate. These movies are fictional fantasy; we all know dragons are not real, and snowmen don’t talk. A person of color with a speaking part, should not be such a stretch.
Frozen is not even historically accurate in representing the population of Denmark (where the story was based) as white. There were people of color in Denmark at the time this story draws its origins from. You will find this excellently proven with documented fine art at medievalpoc.tumblr.com.
We are all conditioned from birth in matters of such things as equality, beauty, design, comfort, and tradition. We are all affected by what we see around us. Whether we like it or not, our world conditions us all from a point of white dominance. To actively exclude people of color from children’s entertainment, is especially racist and destructive to our society.
I grew up with Enid Blyton books full of fabulous white children and black golliwogs.
Television shows were mostly white and male dominated, Santa Claus and all his elves were certainly white. Even God was a white man. While my brain was developing, all of my environmental stimuli, were conditioning me to accept a white, male-dominated world in which most depictions of people of color, were intensely negative.
Beauty in commercials and magazines was catered to men with a passion for skinny white women, the art world was dominated by crazy white men, and the world was run by rich white men and at least one brutal white women. Some of my musical influences were black, but then Elvis died, and Michael Jackson changed his face. I realize things have changed a little, but not nearly enough.
I was raised to be a nurturing and giving child. I was taught to have pity for the plight of the poor people of Africa. I picked rose hips by the millions, collected pennies in a box for the black babies, and donated my dolls and my golliwog (inherited from my grandmother) to charity.
Very subtly and powerfully, my young brain had imprinted; beauty, power, wealth, charity, and goodness with being white. Criminals, famine victims, the desperately poor, and the receivers of charity, as black and brown and other than me. Of course there were exceptions, but this was my general environment.
Being a nice white liberal woman, I rejected racism and inequality. In the 1990s I moved to New York City, and I began working to help underprivileged youth, who were mainly people of color. I dated people I was attracted to, regardless of their race, and I socialized with a very diverse group. I was never a racist, but I had racist white conditioning that I could not even see.
Mortified and disgusted by racism and inequality, many nice white liberal people are still complacent. Our white movies, commercials, TV shows, news reports, and all the other racist white conditioning keeps on coming, and we keep on buying it, as if it’s not killing people of color.
Adopting my dark skinned daughter, whom I had waited for a decade to meet, forced me to shine a light inside my white-conditioned brain. It was like a cluttered basement, full of toxic rubbish, that you don’t remember having put there.
Now I’m in the trenches with other mothers of children of color, trying to protect my kids from racist white conditioning. I am asking that you help us.
Please, look around your home and at your life right now. Are you allowing racist white conditioning to creep in to your children’s minds, or are you working hard to beat racism?
If most of the toys, dolls, and books, in your playroom fail to represent a diverse world, please work harder.
If you have a children’s birthday party in your house and all of your little guests are white, please work harder.
If almost all the music that you listen to in your house is white (even if you have a Jay-Z or Beyonce album) please work harder.
If you really really want to join that Golf Club, and feel that it’s OK because there is one rich black family there, please work harder.
If you chose to send your children to a school which only has one rich black family, one Hispanic child with a scholarship, and three Asian kids, please work harder.
If you think that none of the above matters because you give to charity and you have a couple of friends from another race, please work a lot harder.
My list could go on, but finally, if most of the movies and TV shows that you and your children are watching do not represent people of color fairly, please talk to your children about race and about how it is represented in their entertainment. Find the shows with a fair representation of people of color.
Certainly do watch Frozen, it is a wonderful movie, but do also talk about how it failed us all.
If you don’t work on conditioning your kid’s brains, the world will simply continue to perpetuate the mindset of racist white conditioning, which creates the type of societal structures that allows police officers to kill young black men with impunity.
At the very least it kills the hopes and dreams of children like mine, to reach their full potential.
Imagine that.
Photo: BOMBMAN/Flicke
I WOULD JUST LIKE TO SAY I AGREE WHOLE HEARTEDLY WITH RACHAEL’S OPINION ON HOW IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO KEEP WORKING HARD ON MAKING SURE OUR CHILDREN GROW UP WITH A DECENT , KIND & EQUAL VIEW OF EACHOTHER NO MATTER WHAT COLOUR OUR SKIN IS OR NO MATTER WHAT CREED, AGE OR BELIEF SYSTEM THEY HOLD & THAT ALSO INCLUDES US ADULTS WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER ! WE AS HUMANS ARE GIVEN INTELLIGENCE TO HOPEFULLY LEARN HOW TO MAKE THIS WORLD A BETTER PLACE RIGHT NOW & ESPECIALLY IN OUR FUTURE. UNFORTUNATELY AS HUMANS WE ARE FLAWED BUT… Read more »
“If most of the toys, dolls, and books, in your playroom fail to represent a diverse world, please work harder. I have grandkids anow and I’m looking at their toys. I would say the majority of them are robots, transformer or cartoon characters.” Being boys, MOST of their toys are learning toys, cars trucks etc. My kids are of mixed race and I never viewed anything as one race or another, they were simply toys. And there was never a moment that either of my kids say anything to the effect that there wasn’t brown toys. “If you have a… Read more »
Buy boys African American dolls
Seek out groups that work on diversity for your kids (they even exist in predominately white neighborhoods)
What is white music? Music created by only white folks and doesn’t represent any other culture.
Don’t join “private clubs” they exclude people
If you can’t find a good diverse school- move.
TV imprints powerfully on kids. Avoid it if you can’t talk about race.
And finally- your kids have already noticed race. Pretending that it doesn’t matter doesn’t serve them well because we all know it matters.
The same liberals who have barely uttered a word about this where the abuses were non white? https://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/silence-led-1400-children-sexual-abused-lawes/
If they had been white, liberals would be talking about that one till the cows come home. And here we are talking about toys and disney movies….
Josh; I really do not get why you chose this particular attack on some one who is trying to come at this very same problem in different way. I am not merely talking about toys and Disney movies, but racist white conditioning that makes all of these horrors invisible to a large section of our society. I will tell you that I devote quite a lot of my life to helping foster children who are subjected to rape and child abuse and I have very deep and personal experience with this issue. My own children are people of color and… Read more »
Absolutely LOVE this piece! It is soooo spot on. I think we have been traveling the same wavelength. I recently wrote on something incredibly similar. Thank you for saying what I SAID. I think coming from you its a thought piece….often times i get accused of playing “the race card”.
While I agree with almost everything said in this article I think it should be addressed to all white parents not just liberals.Being conservative does not equal being racist.
I think there are some conditioning issues here that the author need to address also.
One thing that helps me in this regard is that my kids have two cousins that they love very much that are half-Vietnamese.
And it makes me proud when my kids are good friends with kids of a variety of backgrounds. It makes me feel like I’m doing a decent job on this front.