Don’t need a trip to the beauty shop. ‘Cause I love what I got on top. It’s curly and it’s brown and it’s right up there! You know what I love? That’s right, my hair! I really love my hair!
Daija is spending the week with Biker Grandma & Grandpa… this is the hairstyle she went with. From what I hear, it’s holding up really well and has been very popular around town. We’ll see how it looks when I pick her up on Saturday! Fingers crossed… you know we’ve had trouble when Daija went to visit family in years past!
Cathleen Falsani is journalist, blogger and author of several nonfiction books, including the memoir Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace, and the forthcoming The Thread: Faith, Friendship and Facebook.An Anam Cara is someone with whom you share your deepest loves, fears, dreams, doubts, joys and sorrows. That soul friend will know him and love him for exactly who he is. He or she is a friend who will uplift him, reflect God’s love for him, and draw him toward his Creator, not away or astray.
I prayed that, in the words of William Shakespeare, my son would take his soul friends into his heart and “grapple them to [his] soul with hoops of steel.”
Alfonso Andre, drummer for the Mexican band Jaugares, talks about the band’s remake of the song La Martiniana for a new album that commemorates the Mexican Bicentennial. Andre also talks about his conflicted feelings about celebrating Mexico’s history.
A good sex education might delay sexual activity. In fact, a good sex education will ideally delay sexual activity. But that’s not the main purpose of good sex education. The main purpose of sex education is to support lifelong healthy sexuality. We must take the long view here. Sex education should not be designed to keep a student from having sex in high school - that is far too short sighted.
Sex education must be designed to address individuals across their lifespans – to give them tools, skills, knowledge, and strength to understand their bodies, to be both introspective and appropriately communicative about their own desires, respectful about other people’s desires, and both safer and reverent about the entire process.
I’m a 23 year old Sinhalese woman in Minnesota by way of Dubai by way of Sri Lanka. I am a Womanist, and part of my womanism is figuring out how to be in solidarity with my transnational sisters worldwide. I’m a daughter, a sister, a partner and a writer. I’m a brown girl who knows Shakespeare by heart and devours anything Toni Morrison. I believe in radical, revolutionary
A report from the Massachusetts-based Schott Foundation paints a bleak picture of how young black men fare in school: fewer than half graduate from high school. And in some states, like New York, the graduation rate is as low as one in four. The foundation’s John Jackson and David Sciarra of the Education Law Center discuss what’s needed to improve educational attainment among African American children.
Talk all you want about improving our nation’s schools, but the fact is, students can’t close the “achievement gap” when they’re not allowed into the classroom. Yet school suspension rates are climbing and potentially stifling educational opportunity for disadvantaged middle-schoolers, according to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Activists have long warned of the school-to-prison pipeline–sort of the opposite of the honors track, steering poor kids of color into troubled adolescence and eventually the criminal justice system. The SPLC explains, “Disciplinary tactics that respond to typical adolescent behavior by removing students from school do not better prepare students for adulthood. Instead, they increase their risk of educational failure and dropout.”
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)We’ve noted the fetishization of Black women’s butts before, and the conflation of non-White and curvy (also here). Yes, some non-White women have large butts and cleavage. So do lots of White women. And lots of women in all groups don’t have either, or have just one or the other, or have them but don’t still somehow manage to be very thin and toned overall. But having this body type is, in this case and many others, so identified as “ethnic” that White women who have boobs and hips become examples of “ethnic” beauty, not simply a version of female beauty. Notice that Scarlett Johansson’s body isn’t described as having “European curves” or, I don’t know, “British-American curves” or whatever her ethnic background might be in the way that Jennifer Lopez’s curves are perceived as an ethnic marker. It’s a great example of selective perception: women of all racial/ethnic backgrounds share body shapes, but certain physical features, such as hips, are seen as a group characteristic only for some women.
Yet it’s unlikely observant Jews will be able to attend the event, since it’s being held on Yom Kippur — the holiest Jewish holiday — which begins at sundown on Friday, Sept. 17 and ends at sundown on Saturday, Sept. 18 — right when the majority of the action at the conference is happening (including the Israel panel). In 2009, the Values Voter Summit took place during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. “Does the FRC think Jews don’t have values?” wondered Salon’s Washington Correspondent Mike Madden last year. “Or was this just the only fall weekend they could get into the Omni Shoreham hotel?”
Anti-Defamation League spokesman Todd Gutnick said his organization didn’t see much of a problem with the conflict in timing. “Since these are all Christian groups involved, Jews wouldn’t be attending anyway,” he told the Huffington Post. Some conservative groups, however, are trying to make inroads with the Jewish community, recognizing that although some on the right consistently accuse progressives of being anti-Israel or even “anti-Jew”, Jews still overwhelmingly vote Democratic. On Monday, FreedomWorks, which helps organize many of the Tea Party gatherings around the country, told reporters that it was launching “a new initiative to reach out to racial, ethnic and religious minorities” — beginning with Jews, to coincide with the High Holidays.
The Huffington Post contacted FRC Action for comment but did not receive a response.
Elon James has come up with a new This Week in Blackness, and of course I absolutely had to share it with you. This week, Elon talked about the fact that Blacks and Whites experience the same event differently because of racism. Whiteness has been taught to ignore this because it has been normalized therefore; it is quite easy to believe in a universal perspective. There is a large difference
On Yom Kippur, when I stand in synagogue for hours and recite the prayers, striking my fist against my chest to atone for my sins, and as I become more and more tired with the lack of food, water and more importantly, caffeine, it’s then that I feel a kind of certainty that God sees and loves each one of us in all of our totality, even the parts that we hide from one another and from ourselves. Wherever we are, whoever we’re with, God recognizes us and never needs to ask, on Yom Kippur or any other day, “Excuse me, are you Angela?”
by Guest Contributor Collier Meyerson, originally published at Be’Chol Lashon
At 13 years old, in the planning stages of my Bat Mitzvah, my Hebrew School teacher called a meeting at his home to discuss details. He opened his door to see me, my father who is an Ashkenazi Jew and my black mother. Upon seeing my family, without asking, he regrettably informed us that the synagogue, would not allow me to perform the right of passage in their temple because my mother wasn’t a Jew. My wily mother, coyly and smarmily responded “oh, but her mother is Jewish.”
Yes, it turns out my biological mother is a white Ashkenazi Jew.
And with these words, my Hebrew school teacher, as though I was caught in the Woody Allen version of my own life as a film, threw his hands into the air and exclaimed “it’s Bashert [it’s destiny] then! You’ll have your Bat Mitzvah in the Temple!” In that moment I felt a definitive rage. I wanted desperately to be a part of the Upper West Side’s most exclusive and popular clique, Judaism, but felt what would prove to be an indelible stake in this idea of blackness, something pitted against Jewishness. And so there it was, in the home of my Hebrew School teacher that the two were separated, like oil and water.
I was Black and Jewish but I couldn’t be both, I couldn’t be a Black Jew.
by Guest Contributor Paula, originally published at Heart, Mind, and Seoul
I think about the walls that threatened to thwart my growth when I was younger and how completely ill-prepared I was to handle them. If I’m being completely honest with myself, I realize that perhaps I’ve been far too generous in assessing how well equipped I was to deal with the very real walls of racism, prejudice and discrimination throughout my life. I have no doubt that my parents love and concern imparted upon me the knowledge that they were always there for me – and yes, that is huge in it’s own right – but as an Asian girl/adolescent/young adult, I recognize now just how unprepared I was in terms of not having the right language or effective strategies to be my own best advocate in my racially isolated world.
An estimated 20 percent of the adult population in the US is functionally illiterate. That figure SKYROCKETS to over 60 percent when you examine the literacy rates of the inmate population in jails and prisons across the country. And even more appalling is the fact that over 85 percent of juvenile offenders have literacy issues.
Considering that illiteracy commonly leads to lengthy and repeated bouts of unemployment (over 75 percent of unemployed adults have some problems with reading and writing) the low rate of literacy among the inmate population is a recipe for explosive recidivism rates. After all, if an ex-prisoner is unable to find or keep a job due to literacy issues, where else can he turn but back to the behaviors that landed him in jail in the first place?
Although a lot of people take the “lock them up and throw away the key” attitude toward prisoners, and would rather REDUCE the services available to prisoners, there is PROOF that literacy programs in prison CAN and DO help reduce the rates of recidivism, and can lead to an overall reduction in incarceration rates.
This will be an 18 year round/fight.
Keep it clean…your language…your room…etc.
At the end of the match, the winner will be decided by who is left standing, or not in jail, or rehab.
I am taking bets now.
I got some insider information…shhh…this is on the down low.
Us moms are the best bet because we have been there and done that.
Got a teenager to show for it.
Can anybody explain Water Communion to me in a way that doesn’t make it seem like it’s a glorified Show-and-Tell and another example of how classist UUism can be?
Voters in Texas’s 5th District have the opportunity to put an end to the embarrassing and anti-intellectual actions that have diminished education across the state, and that’s an opportunity that will likely impact text book choices around the rest of the United States. I, for one, hope that they opt to do just that by replacing Ken Mercer’s madness with Rebecca Bell-Metereau’s thoughtfulness.
These stories remind us not only that our government has routinely violated the basic civil liberties of so many black activists over several generations, but it reminds us of the complexities and limitations of presumed racial loyalty. The Black Press was given access to movement events and meetings in the 1960s that white reporters were not. Why? It was assumed that a level of racial solidarity and loyalty existed. Maybe that was true. But maybe it wasn’t. We continue to project false expectations onto politicians and self-appointed race leaders because of phenotype rather than politics, ideas and other more tangible markers of “loyalty” to oppressed people. Everyone who looks like “us” is not a friend, and everyone who looks different is not automatically the enemy. This is a simple lesson that some of us still have to learn.
Many people associate prostitution with women walking the streets in shady areas and being picked up by johns. But Claudia says the prostitution ring for which she was forced to work had a long list of clients who knew the price they had to pay, who to call and where to go. It’s a well-organized and lucrative underground industry. Luis CdeBaca monitors human trafficking at the U.S. State Department. He says there are no reliable figures on the scale of the problem, but forced prostitution from Mexico and Central America is a big part of it.
As we move out of the early years, through the middle years, into the teen and young adult years, I wonder how the objectification I wrote about years ago will impact my children. As they move from hearing stereotypes like “Mixed kids/babies are SOOO cute!” (I’m sorry, but they’re not all cute) to “Mixed guys/girls are so HOT” (or exotic or striking), I wonder how to prepare them for the harsh reality of interracial dating, which will be much different for them than it was for me. I think it’s obvious in “Post Racial America” how deeply stereotypes are imbedded in our subconscious; when you couple that with a pop culture that objectifies women in general, particularly women of color, and romanticizes abusive relationships (from cliques to intimate partner abuse to domestic violence), I find myself worrying more about teen dating violence than teen pregnancy.
As our children grow older, and going beyond the social interactions of elementary school, what do relationships look like from junior high through adulthood, if our children don’t feel comfortable setting boundaries?
Thinking specifically about my children’s African ancestry, I’m reminded of an article I read titled Trying to Break A ‘Culture of Silence’ on Rape: Group Part of Movement Tailoring Recovery Efforts to Minority Women where psychologist Carolyn West explains,
There was that belief that black women were unrapable,” West said. “Legally, it wasn’t a crime to rape black women, literally for hundreds of years.
Going back to Does Anybody Else Look Like Me?, author Donna Nakazawa writes,
Biracial girls are often considered beautiful objects of curiosity because of their exotic looks, this attention does not necessarily translate into dating partners.
I was talking to my son just a while ago about some events taking place later this week, and as I was explaining civil disobedience & non violent resistance (It’s like you ripping up that test last spring, even after the teacher threatened your grade), we talked a little more about why I feel SB 1070 is an unjust and immoral law.
Anybody who knows me personally would most likely agree that I probably talk to my kids about race, stereotypes and racial profiling more than anybody we know.
According to statistics, they are conversations that many who are in a position to do so, avoid. These are not easy conversations to have, and there are many times where I feel wholly inadequate in teaching my children to navigate through this muck. Sure, there are plenty of rainbow conversations about how we’re all heart and spirit under our skin early on, but there are many more that are painful. Like taking a potatoe peeler or cheese grater to your skin. Because sometimes by the time it’s over, you are ready to flay the skin from your own body and every body else’s just to be done with it. Sometimes because someone said some hateful thing to or in front of your child or they said some hateful thing to someone else… but as time goes on, sometimes you learn they have picked up some stereotype or prejudice of their own.
But still, no matter how difficult or painful, these conversations are some of the most important a parent can have with a child.
When I asked my son what might lead an officer to suspect someone was not in the country legally and he answered, with only a little doubt in his voice… Read more…
I got an email with information about a Loving Day Celebration from the organizer of the East Valley Interracial Couples & Families Meetup Group, and wanted to put it out there for those in the Phoenix area who may be interested:
We thought it would be a good idea to celebrate Loving Day but couldn’t find anything in Arizona on line for the event so we made our own. The event will be at Tempe Town Lake on the 12th from 10-12:30. This is our first time doing something like this so it will be very small and we are still trying to grow the group
THANKS ERICA!
East Valley Interracial Couples & Families Meetup Group (Scottsdale, AZ) – Meetup.com.
So I have this new friend… her name is Maisha. She found my blog after I made the following comment on What Tami Said: Relationships 2.0: Are you my real friends or are you just virtual?.
November 5, 2009 7:56 PM
curlykidz said…
Absolutely real! Some of my closest friends are people I met online between 7 & 10 years ago. I live on the same block as one of them now, and one of us does morning carpool & the other afternoon carpool. Another flew from Philly to Phoenix to be with me IN THE DELIVERY ROOM when I gave birth to my youngest… it was the second time we’d ever met “in person”, but we talk almost every single day.Virtual friendships can be very superficial, but that’s true of “real” friendships as well.
I suspect the hook for her was Christie’s attendance at Daija’s labor & delivery, since Maisha is/was a childbirth educator before returning to school for her nursing certification (congrats again!). Maisha followed the link to my blog, where she noticed that Daija’s hair texture was very similar to her daughter’s, and gave the Naturally Curly method a try. Not too much later, I added the “contact form” so people could send messages directly to me without me having to publish my email address. Maisha was the first person I got a message from.
Aaah, the cosmic order of the internets.
We exchanged an email or two, but both of us being busy mamas, it didn’t go much further than that. Some weeks or months later, I connected with a member of my church on Facebook, and noticed THEY were friends. I figured this was a pretty good sign that Maisha wasn’t crazy and friended her, and the rest, as they say, is history. We arranged a playdate for the kids a couple months later, and they all got on like a house on fire, but especially our eldest kids, both middle school boys, both biracial, and both with learning differences.
I got a phone call yesterday from Christie… who, of all my “virtual” friends, is the hardest to keep up with. So much so that I answered the phone with,
You NEVER call me. What’s going on?
Thankfully, there was no crisis… it was just a “it’s been too long since we caught up” call. I was telling her about Maisha, seeing as how most of my social calendar revolves around her family anymore, and told her how we were going to be bringing Maisha into “the tribe.” Which was a little ironic, as I reread Tami’s blog this morning…
When I began writing online about the things that are most important to me, I soon found a small group of cyber-friends who inspire me, who write things that seem like they tumbled from my own mind, who share some of my beliefs, opinions and obsessions and challenge others, who crack my shit up on the regular. I found my tribe–folks who speak my language–online.
This entry is in partly background for a couple blogs that are still in draft, and partly a marvel at serendipity. I have some rich and beautiful friendships that have either started online, or that began in person and were able to continue after someone moved away… but the one complaint that these friends and I share is that for most of us, our friendships aren’t really able to include our families. So, this is mostly a big, big thank you to Tami Winfrey… you have no idea what a gift you gave Maisha and I, or what a blessing that gift has been for our children.
Last night while at my sister’s band concert someone came up to me during the intermission and complimented me on how pretty my kids are, and I thanked her. Then she asked, right in front of Tyler, who has a mind like a steel trap and never forgets a damn thing, “are they half-breeds?” I sat there in stunned silence, thinking…
Oh, no she didn’t…
"Big Fat Head"
Dr 2nd Grade,
Could you please speak with the boy who sits behind Daija about this? Its such a struggle for my girls to maintain a healthy self esteem and racial identity. This isn’t the first time Daija has complained that someone in class made her feel bad about her hair, But its the first time she’s begged me to straighten it…
“Even if it burns me, I promise not to cry.”
I’m pretty upset by this, and so is she.
So a couple weeks ago I was invited to be a contributing blogger for multiracial families at The Next Family. My contributions will actually start waaaay back in 1999 when I first started blogging, so readers can kinda follow along with our family story. So, if you happen to have missed the last ten years of my wit, wisdom, and sheer brilliance… by all means, hustle on over there and subscribe to the RSS feed.
What is The Next Family?
The Next Family is a diverse community where modern families meet. It is the start of an on-going open minded and sincere dialog between urbanite families, adoptive families, in vitro parents, interracial families, same sex parents, single parents and so on. It is a way to remind people that the Next Generation of families already exists in larger numbers than the old model of a “family unit”.
The Next Family is the foundation of future families.
As you navigate through our site, please start the dialog with us by offering input as to the ways today’s Modern Families aren’t being served. Let us know what products you wish you had access to or cool stuff you would like to be created just for your “Next Family”.
This site will have resources available and answers to those tough questions you are asked about your own family or the family around the corner from you. The tough questions are asked, and the answers will be as diverse as our community.
We look forward to hearing your stories, and meeting your family!
You can check out my introduction at The Next Family — A Diverse Community For Modern Families.
I touched on issues surrounding the term illegal alien* a couple weeks ago in Walking the (color)Line, when I mentioned a couple ways I suspected this term has affected my children’s perceptions of the Latino community. There was a part of me that wondered whether I was reading too much into things… but let’s just say that’s no longer a concern. Within the last week or two, I read a blog or article about multiracial girls being asked what color their husbands would be. I wondered if Halle had ever heard or been asked something like this. I made a little note to self to bring it up, but Thursday night in the car, she raised the subject. She was talking about how she was going to date a boy for one year when she grew up, and asked if that was too long. I told her it depended on the boy; with some boys, a year might be too long, with another, a year may not be long enough. She suddenly started talking about whether this boy might be white or black and something about so and so… I interrupted and asked if people asked her that, and she confirmed. Then I asked, “Do you guys talk about that?” and she responds matter of factly, “Oh, yeah.” I asked if that was something that had just come up this year, and she said no, it was last year too. I asked how it came up, and she said, just when they talk about who they think is cute. She continued with her story…
“Anyway, so and so asked me once, and I said he would probably be Black or White, but not Mexican, but then I met Tristan, and I like him and I think he’s cute, and he’s Mexican…”
Her voice trailed off.
I asked why she hadn’t thought she would date someone who was Mexican before Tristan.
“Well, cuz they do a lot of bad things. I mean, they’re always on the news cuz they’re criminals… and stuff.”
cue my breaking (anti-racist) heart.
Needless to say, we had an immediate conversation about perception, stereotypes, racism, media bias, and Bull Connor Jr. Nickel Bag Joe Sherrif Arpaio. And we will continue to have these conversations (and others, like how there are a lot more people in the world than just Black, White or Hispanic), because this IS a big problem. And it’s not because this flies in the face of what I believe personally, but because the seed of racism is finding roothold in the heart of THIS child.
Her love is like the ocean...
This is my UU, social justice, civil action child. This is the child who drew the line with her peers over the n-word. This is the child who has volunteered to mentor special needs kids or served in student government or both for three of the four years she’s been attending her current school. This is the child whose teacher has made it a point to contact me no less than three times so far this school year to express his gratitude to and praise the way Halle had befriended a new ESL student, which makes me wonder that my daughter’s unreserved offer of friendship is already rare by the age of 10. This is the child who took the initiative, unsolicited, and went to a Spanish-speaking teacher to get a “cheat sheet” of basic conversational phrases, and carried two spanish english dictionaries with her every day for the first two months of school.
“Now think carefully about what I’m saying, and why it matters. Here was a woman who no longer could recognize her own children; a woman who had no idea who her husband had been; no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it was; and yet, knew what she had been taught at a very early age to call black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked away like a ticking time bomb in the far corners of her mind, it would reassert itself and explode with a vengeance. She could not remember how to feed herself. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could recognize a nigger. America had seen to that, and no disease would strip her of that memory. Indeed, it would be one of the last words I would hear her say, before finally she stopped talking at all. “ ~Tim Wise, White Like Me
This is the depth of our racist conditioning.
When one refers to an immigrant as an “illegal alien,” they are using the term as a noun. They are effectively saying that the individual, as opposed to any actions that the individual has taken, is illegal. The term “illegal alien” implies that a person’s existence is criminal. I’m not aware of any other circumstance in our common vernacular where a crime is considered to render the individual – as opposed to the individual’s actions – as being illegal. We don’t even refer to our most dangerous and vile criminals as being “illegal.”
I need to find the charger for the digital camera so I can get a better video, but this is how we refresh our Doodles (check out the curly hair page for more pics & details) in the mornings.
written by Love Isn’t Enough contributor Catherine Anderson
originally published in Hip Mama Magazine (Issue 44-Creativity Issue-October 2009)
When crazy hair day is postedExcuse me?
Well, crazy hair day can be a little
Three days later and Sam still hasCrazy Hair Day | Love Isn’t Enough – on raising a family in a colorstruck world.
Sometimes, I just don’t know what to say. The next time disney pulls something from the vault and releases it as “remastered” I’m going to have some questions!
crossposted from Sociological Images
For more posts on Disney princesses, look here, here, here, here, and here. Two other great posts include this rejection letter (”we don’t hire women”) and this post on the original inclusion of black slaves in Fantasia.
[Love Isn't Enough editor's note: Note, too, that but for Jazmin, who is kind of brownish, Disney's princesses hold fast to a European-influenced beauty hierarchy.]
Hat tip to Jezebel for alerting me to this post. Also on Jezebel, see what one woman is doing to make Barbies more diverse. It’s awesome! I’ve never wanted a Barbie before, but now…
When I was in high school, I did a report on Race and Gender in Disney for History Day. The report itself was weak (I was 14 years old), and I still have a soft spot for Disney, since I was raised with it and their movies are visually masterful, but this post reaffirms what I was trying to get across to the judges: that Disney does promote messages that are actively harmful, and whether or not that’s deliberate, they have a responsibility as providers of entertainment for children to be responsible in the messages being sent. Then that got into a whole capitalism-responsibility debate (if you don’t like it, don’t watch, etc.), plus the fact that my topic was considered a bit unsavory, I think.
Some major things that I really felt strongly on were the rewriting of Pocahontas’s history (REAL PERSON) and the Mulan story (Here: Mulan was a SUPER-PATRIOTIC lady who served in the army for her family since her brothers were too young, and in the end, astonished her comrades by revealing she was a woman, since they never would have guessed. Vs. Disney’s Mulan who goes into and stays in the army for her father, falls in love with her commander, and, when revealed, uses, you guessed it, her sexuality, this time socially conditioned sexuality, to save… a man. Although apparently, there was a Chinese TV show that used the romance theme as a gag when Mulan’s general has to confront his “homosexuality.”). Oh, and Fantasia, of course, but no one ever believes me on that until they see the video for themselves.
“Beauty and the Beast” tends to break the mold (despite Belle’s lack of a mother, her motherish “fairy godmother” Mrs. Potts, and the clownish “gag fat woman” dresser/chiffarobe/thing). HOWEVER, this is due to the outright theft of the “Belle as bookish” motif from the novel “Beauty” by Robin McKinley (published fully 23 years before the 1991 movie release)– the library gift in particular is almost word-for-word what ended up in the film– in response to protest over “The Little Mermaid,” plus the theft of the Gaston archetype (and other visuals) from Cocteau’s film “Beauty and the Beast.”
Esmerelda, oddly, is not included as a Disney Princess at all, despite Mulan’s inclusion, and she’s not a princess, either. I think it’s because Esmerelda is seen as too sexual to be a role model, honestly. Then again, I remember my main impressions of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” being that Esmerelda was gorgeous, and that Frollo was waaaaaay too creepy for me to begin to be comfortable with. Speaking of sex, Tinkerbell is heading the “Disney Fairies” line, which is nice, especially with the introduction of POC as other fairies; but she was originally introduced in Peter Pan (which is like a black hole of women- and race-related issues, seriously) as petty, vain, and sexualized, but who eventually redeems herself. I understand Hugo didn’t help by killing Esmerelda off in the source material, but as I recall, Tinkerbell dies in the Peter Pan book, as well. I guess you can sanitize the sex out of a white character, but not out of a brown one?
I’m concerned about “The Princess and the Frog,” because at first I was hoping Disney was just feeding off of HBO Family’s “Fairy Tales for Every Child,” but she still appears to be a traditionally “European” princess as far as dress and hairstyling go. Her turning into a frog for most of the movie is also an issue for me, but I was more stunned by the giant, fat, bipedal gator (a la All Dogs Go To Heaven) in the trailer to really analyze the “ethnically ambiguous” prince. Despite how happy I am we’re finally, officially getting a black princess, I would watch it by myself before I took anybody’s kid to see it.
via Disney Princesses, Deconstructed | Love Isnt Enough – on raising a family in a colorstruck world.
Word of the Day UUCP BLOG: Beacon in the Desert Hot Off the Press:
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