Driving back from the orthodontist yesterday, my kids and I were chatting. My 13-year-old is going to do an oral report on Walt Disney. “I need a prop,” she said. “I think I have a Pooh Bear stuffed animal. Didn’t he make up Winnie the Pooh?”
I read the “classic” Pooh stories by A.A. Milne to her as a toddler, but the power of video overruled. “Melanie, Walt Disney didn’t make up Winnie the Pooh. Mostly, he re-told other people’s stories.”

“What about Mickey Mouse?” my son piped in. Which is true, to Walt’s credit. We had an interesting discussion about the Disney stories, the retelling of fairy tales, the common themes in many of them (girl missing one or both parents needing to be rescued by a man). My 13-year-old is on to old Walt.

“Did you know that none of the Disney Princesses are African-American?” my 11-year-old son offered. He told us they had discussed this at school, because Disney is currently at work on a new animated movie, The Frog Princess, the heroine of which is a woman of color named Maddy.

“What do you think about that?” I asked my son.
“There should be one,” he said. “Because little black girls should have a princess who looks like them.”
Racism is embedded in our culture. Part of raising my kids, I think, is getting them to notice this, and to care about it. I’m thankful that my son’s wonderful teacher, Mrs. Kennedy, had them talk about this.

We talked about the fact that the majority of Disney Princesses are white (Snow White obviously the “fairest of them all”). But in the last decade or so, Disney’s added an Asian princess (Mulan, my favorite because she’s a warrior), a Middle-Eastern princess (Jasmine, who ends up marrying Aladdin in the film of that name), and a Native American (Pocahontas).
There’s also Esmerelda (the dark gypsy beauty who befriends Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), but she doesn’t even make it onto the official Disney princess website, apparently since she is not technically a princess (or her movie was not quite as popular as the others).

I find it encouraging that my son thinks everyone ought to have a hero (or heroine) who looks like them. It shouldn’t surprise me, since this same child spent months growing his hair long so he would look like Anakin Skywalker.
A princess who looks like me. A jumping off point for flights of imagination. What girl doesn’t want to see herself as a princess: the chosen one, who goes on great adventures and lives happily ever after? It may not be real life but it’s the stuff little girls love.
The earliest Disney Princesses perpetuated a sexist myth that women without a man to rescue them were helpless. By the time my daughter was born, at least some of the new generation of Disney princesses (Mulan and Pocahontas) were going off on adventures to save their people.
You can boo-hoo this as too politically correct, but what would it be like to grow up living in a culture that showed little girls what beauty (and more recently, strength) looks like, and it didn’t look like you?
As my 11-year-old son said, “that would be sad.”

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