Movies

Being a little girl "cursed", as I saw it, with plain brown hair and plain brown eyes, I was very happy to see a brown-haired actress in the role of a famous princess.

Now, this may seem like the most overdone use of the concept of representation ever mentioned, but I had learned by first grade that blonde-haired girls were special and Ms. Warren's placement as Cinderella really did affect me. Years later, a brown-haired roommate and I tried to help my boyfriend understand the degree to which we resonated with Whoopie Goldberg's comedy bit where she put a pillowcase or something over the back of her head and reveled in her "long golden hair".

My boyfriend simply could not grasp why we appreciated Ms. Goldberg humorous routine. But then, again, he was the sort to insist that racism "wasn't a thing" anymore; and this was before the election of Barack Obama.

Please understand that I'm not claiming any childhood trauma or crying that I suffered any discrimination as a White child in my White little world. But that early experience of being fed the golden-haired beauty ideal at least set me upon the path of thinking about why some people were privileged over others, even if the word, "privilege" might not have been in my vocabulary at the time.

I was only about 20 when the mini-series, Roots hit the airwaves. It inspired me to read Alex Haley's novel. One particular passage provided for me what I have since termed my first "anthropological moment". In this part of the story, Kunta Kinte is dragged out of the slave ship onto the docks of Annapolis where he sees a White, blonde woman for the first time. He notes that she has hair, "the color of dried grass" and skin "like the underbelly of a toad." Boy, did that knock the golden-haired, alabaster-skinned goddess off her pedestal.

So, even though I don't really understand what it means to experience prejudice or discrimination, I am able to draw upon some of my minor, albeit childish feelings of being told that I didn't fit a prescribed ideal to extrapolate the tiniest glimmer of what it feels like to know that somehow I wasn't "good enough" because of some basic physical characteristic. Again, my experience is nowhere near to the level of a Black child growing up in this country learning that somehow they are "the wrong" color. But it has provided me with the basis to try and see things from another person's perspective.