Disney's The Princess and the Frog: The Pride, the Pressure, and the Politics of Being a First

I felt it when I was a kid. Why could I look in these big, beautifully illustrated books and find no reflection of myself? . . . We want to show little kids of all colors and stripes that they can be kings, queens and other characters in wonderful fairytales that touch us all. (Eirik Knutzen's, Robert Guillaume, co-producer, Home Box Office Series, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, 1995) When I was young, all the fairytale princesses had long blond hair. When you are black, you just don't feel like it could be you. (Roslyn Rozbruch's Donna Brown Guillaume, co-producer, Home Box Office Series, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, 1995) Barbie never told Black girls/they are beautiful. (Essex Hemphill "Soft Targets (For Black Girls"), 2006) Introduction, or Does One Size Really Fit All? On the first days of my African-American children's literature course and at the beginning of my in-service and preservice teacher workshops, I ask participants to close their eyes for ten seconds and to imagine the character Cinderella. After the ten seconds pass, I ask them to open their eyes and to describe what they saw in their minds' eyes. Without fail, almost everyone describes Disney's 1950 animated blonde Cinderella. Occasionally and depending on the participants' ages, someone visualizes one of the other nonanimated television versions of the fairy tale featuring brunette Julie Andrews in 1957 or brunette Leslie Ann Warren in 1965. To date, participants always see Cinderella as white. In her comments on updating and revising the Cinderella archetype, Laura Shapiro pinpoints a sociopsychological inability of many Americans to reimagine and to reimage: "The blonde with the tiny feet has an amazing hold on our psyches. Disney set the standard" (77). Disney film scholar Kay Stone adds that the resulting Cinderella image defines not just an ideal, but rather the ideal which has for most of us become the definitive image: "Disney told his illustrators he wanted an ail-American girl" (Shapiro 77). Such an exercise underscores the ubiquitousness of the Disney version and the Disney empire. Disney scholar Kathy Meriock Jackson admits that "Disney's influence [on children is] an almost inescapable part of growing up" (84). As a globally dominant producer of cultural constructs related to gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality, Disney reigns supreme, and part of that supreme reign is an unquestionable privileging of patriarchy and whiteness. Indeed, American media, literature, and other popular and material culture consumed by both children and adults continue to glorify and to conflate beauty, fame, fortune, and desire with whiteness. Marcia Ann Gillespie summarizes and critiques this Disney-perpetuated idolatry of whiteness: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? America's mirror screams back blondie: Rapunzel, Cinderella, Marilyn Monroe, Christie Brinkley, Diane Sawyer, Michelle Pfeiffer . . . Oh yes, sometimes the look changes as those who are styled arbiters decree brunettes, exotics or ethnics the latest "in" look. But no matter that they may sing the praises of voluptuous this year or dark sultry the next, the objects of beauty are always overwhelmingly white. (74) Rarely do participants in the mind's eyes exercise visualize the African- American pop singer and actor Brandy Norwood, who played the lead in the 1997 televised version of Disney's nonanimated Cinderella; executive-produced by Whitney Houston, and with a multicultural and interracial star-studded cast of Jason Alexander, Whoopi Goldberg, Whitney Houston, and Bernadette Peters. In that rare instance when a participant mentions or describes Brandy as Cinderella, such a comment typically comes from an African American. For me, this brief exercise reveals the extent to which ideas and images are so subconsciously ingrained because of social and media saturation that we really do not have to think before we respond with confident authority. …