Category Archives: african-american

those in the know, know. i grow florid with passion when i discuss my hatred for the disney corporation. they are stupid, they are ugly, they are greedy. i hate the pixar stuff in particular. i have seen breathtakingly insensitive references to adoption, abandonment, and the fate of orphans in disney films. not to mention that no protagonist in a disney film seems ever allowed to have two living parents by the end.

i knew that having a black daughter coinciding with the release of the princess and the frog was fairly fraught. our kids go to a preschool with a “no disney” rule, so they weren’t going to come up against much of it by accident. and i’ve been proud of the fact that the kids just don’t know much about dora, wonderpets, or any of the other really crapola stuff out there. (and have only eaten at mc donald’s twice in their lives.) it’s not a crusade to keep these things entirely out of the kids’ lives (although i’m sure that it’d be MUCH more interesting to gossip about me if it was presented as such) — it’s an intellectual exercise. we make the rules.

claudia has entered the princess phase. who knows where it even came from, but she loves it, so we — in our own fashion — encourage it. we CERTAINLY encourage a wide definition of what a princess might look like and do. we filter for claudia, and claudia filters what we say into her own reality (and what she can get away with.) thereby, we have our household’s definition of “princess” — somebody who HAS to behave nicely, HAS to keep her nose wiped (NOT with her tongue), and who twirls around a lot.

yesterday claude and i were flipping through the free netflix films on the tv and i asked her if she’d like to watch the princess and the frog. she had never heard of it, but even with the word “princess” in it, she nixed it. we settled on some felix the cat shorts from 1960, and béla joined us to watch.

suffice it to say that “evil scientists” now rank high on the scale of things with which we can threaten the children.

within eight minutes, both kids had run shrieking from the tv room. they stood cowering in the kitchen, insisting “NO MORE WONDERFUL WONDERFUL CAT!” while i promised they would not have to see felix again, and could watch something else.

“i see… the frog?” claudia suggested.

how funny. she had eliminated the word “princess” from what she remembered about my earlier suggestion. but, yes, i said, they could watch SOME of the princess and the frog.

it was like i had tied them to their seats and gagged them. that is how still and quiet they were. i don’t really know what b. was getting out of it but i could see clearly what it was doing for claudia. little brown girl. singing brown girl. dresses. twirling. a girl who wants to bake wonderful desserts for everyone. a brown girl. oh boy.

the music: not horrible. the animation: not hideous.

still, i winced at a lot, even in just the twenty minutes we saw. of course, the poor child’s father was dead almost instantly. and hell — this prince character — is he white, or black, or what? why can’t he have black features? would he no longer be “handsome”?

we only saw twenty minutes before they had to head to their baths. but when i was dressing claudia this morning she asked if today she could “watch tiaga”.

of course she can.

what she can NOT watch is willow smith whipping “her” goddamned hair back and forth. that’s a sin against humanity.

in september of 2010, the kids saw kùlú mèlé for the first time, at the please touch museum. claudia was as impressed as anyone would have expected from claudia — which is to say, a lot. we heard a lot afterward about “dancers with brown skin”, and she would frequently comment that locs were “for dancing”.

both claudia and béla got on their feet for kùlú mèlé. when béla does that, you know it’s good.

black friday weekend we went to see kùlú mèlé’s production of mali sadjo: legend of the hippopotamus.

claudia had insisted that she needed to “wear a beautiful dress” to this performance and i could not have been happier when that dress turned out to be an african print (with flouncy pink skirt underneath). we are entering the “princess” phase with claudia, and we are always looking for alternative views to the pink-and-blonde disney variety (and frankly we don’t care for the black disney variety either). to hear claudia say the words “my beautiful african dress” was very comforting.

nobody told claudia that the dancers in kùlú mèlé were princesses, but believe me, nobody had to. they fit the bill.

she was a little confused by the narrative, at least by what she saw of it. she saw the baby had been born, and then was asking a lot of questions about where the baby had gone — to the doctor? when we explained that the baby was now one of the grown-up women, she was VERY put-off — mostly because she had believed that the baby was a baby hippopotamus.

this production was long for the kids and we left slightly before intermission because they were losing cohesion, but up until that point they both had been riveted. while ben went for the car, anyone in the lobby of the painted bride got quite a show (and probably got hit in the shins).

as expected, in the morning, it was time to “play kùlú mèlé”. we put on african drum music and both kids danced. i looked out into the playroom to find that claudia had put a baby doll under her dress to simulate pregnancy. (she also continued to insist that it was a hippo.)

speaking of dolls — and i have been planning to speak of dolls for some time — there was a small artists’ market at the bride last night with jewelry and other items, and at a table featuring the work of a doll maker, i saw this sign.

this issue has been on my radar. we’ve made a visit to the philadelphia doll museum, and i was so interested to read roschelle’s post about why she did not like black dolls as a child. i have looked at the dolls claudia has, and they are definitely just “white” dolls made with brown plastic or brown fabric. the features aren’t right. i also got my own little slap in the face, as to up until reading roschelle’s post, i had thought that the rampaging number of black “primitive” dolls on the handmade sites out there were kinda cute. (actually, i DO think they are cute, but they have no current place in helping form my two year-old black daughter’s self-identity.)

it being the holiday season, guess who has been asking every santa she runs across for a new “brown doll”?

she’s definitely ready for that doll — the doll we all had, the doll we loved to death, that our mother made clothes for to match our own. well, i wanted that doll to be the right doll. and found a website where they definitely care about such things. (so fascinating to see that they also specialize in a line of down syndrome dolls. one of claudia’s favorite friends at school has down syndrome.)

here is the doll santa has chosen. we found, through this site, that there is also an artisan who will re-wig rooted doll hair to make it more like natural african hair. we are not having that done yet, but if claudia at some point wanted to have her doll’s hair locked or in some other style, i’m all for that.

back to kùlú mèlé: like noreum machi, kùlú mèlé are a group i would literally go see every week of my life if i could. the use of costumes and textiles is incredible. everyone at their events is so warm and having so much fun. the place was PACKED and i love the bride as a venue.

the night before we went to kùlú mèlé we had gone to a party/house performance at her dance teacher, ellie’s, home, and claudia was down on the floor warming up with the other dancers.

dance is so important to her. i hope so much that there is a place in kùlú mèlé’s children’s group for claudia when she is of age, because it seems so right.

we’re big “spooky” buffs in our house, and while our children are not exposed to anything truly violent and inappropriate (except maybe that viewing of “blood feast” when claudia was a week old), they do have a higher tolerance for b-movie, old-school “scary” stuff than the average toddler.

so, during the halloween season, between their viewings of “it’s the great pumpkin, charlie brown” and their pilgrimages to the rubber costume masks at CVS and target, we watched michael jackson’s “thriller” video. it was pushing the envelope, to be sure, but i was interested to see what claudia’s reaction would be to the dancing. after all, it’s the best one — and “beat it” has a knife fight. i am way more okay with the undead than i am with a knife fight.

both kids watched “thriller” with utter fascination, and mild distaste, the first few times — but they were definitely into it. more so claude, of course, who plugs in to the dance stuff. she was also a little extra invested in the whole experiment when i told her michael was black, like she is.

it’s not just michael jackson’s blackness that requires explanation for claudia — it’s everyone’s. she doesn’t distinguish between black people and white people all that clearly, although she is, in general, interested in taxonomy. while walking, or snuggling, we like to name all the korean people we know, or the black people, or people with beards, or women, or men — she likes all categorizing. but white and black are the onse she is most likely to get wrong. then again, she’s also gotten them right when i’ve gotten them wrong, telling me one of her teachers was black, when i was pretty sure the woman was straight-up caucasian. (we asked. she has a japanese mother and a black father.)

when asked, “who are some of the black people we know?” claudia often responds, “dancers.” (and then, if pressed for more, sometimes says, “black people.”) but, michael’s blackness was only part of the draw for her, as was his dancing. “michael turn into a spooky,” she told everyone who would listen. “and then he turn regular.”

we did not know how much time she was spending on “thriller” in her head until one morning she asked ben and i to hug one another. “now say, ‘i love you,’” she directed. we did. “now, you don’t turn into a wolf,” she warned ben.

the lycanthropy portion of the video is her least favorite. but, given an opportunity to not watch “thriller” at all, she will wind up on the couch in front of it; given a blanket to cover her face, she will push the blanket away. she likes the dancing; she loves the romance between michael and ola ray.

when this combination first came out of the dress-up box, i wasn’t sure what she was doing. when i saw it was accompanied by unusually prissy (for claudia) running, and squealing, “aaaaah! i’m scared!”, i understood. i asked if she would like to act out the scene where “the lady” was on the couch, screaming, and michael touched her and said, “what’s the problem? come on. i’ll take you home.” i was the best mom in the world at that moment, i saw it in her eyes as we did the scene.

i guess i could pretend to be disappointed that she decided, with all those other wonderful characters in the video, to “be” the helpless woman, but she does also dance the robot, and pretends to be the corpse at the end of the film who is pretending he does not have a head. no, if something about those double-x chromasomes makes her want to run around helplessly and wear a flowing scarf, i see no problem. (she found, like a hawk, a frilly pink tulle skirt at target today that she immediately asked to purchase “for the lady”.)

i had wondered where michael jackson would fall into the big sloppy curriculum of birthculture figures, and now i guess we know — he was pretty much at the top of the deck. i’m happy, after all the sadness and ugliness that enveloped his life, that that can be true. there’s plenty of time for the more confusing stuff later. i think that claude is hitting prime readiness for the wizard of oz, which means the wiz as well.