Brown Cinderella: Learning to be the princess of my own story – By Angie Interian (Youth Voices) / Dec 11, 2023
I wrote and drew my first story about a princess and her knight in shining armor when I was just 5 years old. She wore a light pink dress, crystal clear heels like Cinderella and a diamond necklace that looked more like a towel wrapped around her neck. With gorgeous blonde hair, because God knows I absolutely hated my thick dark hair, and beautiful blue eyes, she was the spitting-image of the person I wish I looked like growing up as a Latina.
At the time I didn’t know — being a kindergartner — that I was subconsciously drawing the images of the people I was primarily taught by and surrounded with in my classroom growing up: white people.
There was no embrace of my culture in my classroom. We watched no movies that resonated with me, and it didn’t take a scientist to figure out how different my life was compared to the rest of the kids. If I asked the teacher for a “skin color” pencil, she would hand me a peach colored one, and that felt as normal as writing my name. As a result, I truly believed that the only people capable of success were white people. Anytime I wrote, drew or even thought about characters for a story, without hesitation, I’d draw a white person.
