Disney Princesses Not Inclusive: Jolie

Angelina Jolie is ticked off because Disney doesn’t have a black princess.

Busy creating a wonderful international family with children in every shade imaginable (an admirable task), I guess she has turned her concern with how to mould her children to looking blindly at the physical signs of genetic variation found in people from different areas of the world.

What - Princess Jasmine not black enough for you?

Believe it or not, it is possible to do this without having Walt Disney’s marketing department involved, Angelina!

I don’t pretend to be perfect as a parent, but I know one thing is for sure - your kids will be as racist as you are, or less. We know black people, Filipino people, Chinese people, Indo-Canadians, etc. When we meet them, we treat them like anyone else. My kids never see us act differently, so they don’t either. I recall just last week, a lady and her two sons came to our church for the first time. They were Indo-Canadians. I wanted to make sure her kids were having a good time, so afterwards I quizzed my 7 year old about the new kid. My son is almost as bad with names as I am so I asked him if he noticed a new boy in his class. I asked him to describe the boy. He told me everything about the boy but no matter what I did I couldn’t get him to volunteer the skin colour even though it was the most obvious difference between himself and the boy. I didn’t teach him that - it just doesn’t register when you have been raised without being told that people are different.

It doesn’t matter if Disney has made a movie about their culture or not. In fact, it is insulting to think that you can’t teach inclusivity without inculcating it into every single media your children interact with.