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I’m a 90’s baby and I’m proud of it! One of the things that I don’t do much is gush about all the shows, music, trends, etc. that I grew up with and remain close to my heart. And, of course, now that I’m older, I see where problematic elements are as well as Epic Win moments are. Then there’s also the respect that must be given to people that were not born in the 90’s, but absolutely love and reminisce about what they grew up with as well.
So! Does anyone remember or has anyone at least heard of HBO Family’s Happily Ever After Series? It was a series that ran from 1995-2000 (1). It was narrated by the phenomenal Robert Guillame and was made of three seasons. Famous actors, actresses, and singers that helped to voice the show range from Whoopi Goldberg and Gladys Knight to B.D Wong and Maria Conchita Alonso. Here’s a little summary/refresher straight from the website itself, lovelies (2):
And that’s basically the gist of what Happily Ever After (I’ll abbreviate it HEA from here) is all about: respectfully and enthusiastically taking ethnic-as well as female-minorities and putting them in the spotlight that has long-since been granted only to white majorities. Here are just a few of the wonderful examples:
Robin Hood is a Mexican female: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAh4A1oe7nc
Ali Baba is female. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib3xlMr9HV0
The Little Mermaid is an Asian. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG0m6wif36U
The Twelve Dancing Princesses are African. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gyNwGlG3Mo
King Midas is African, as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLGkkTwjCcs
Did I mention that Robin Hood is a Mexican female?
Even where representation of race and gender isn’t a problem, HEA still changes it up. For example, Aladdin is traditionally an Arabic male-he is a minority. But HEA shows his story in the form of an Asian male: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8wRxyCi_eQ
One could easily say that HEA is showing all kinds of ethnicities in all kinds of fairy tales (over thirty-nine have been adapted by the show) to keep the audience engaged and coming back for more.
But I believe that there is a deep message in there. And I believe that that message is very, very deep and very, very wonderful.
To explain what I think that message is and where I think that message comes from, I’ll step outside of HEA and into mainstream culture for a moment. From a very, very young age-deliberately or not-our culture tells us that because we look a certain way, then we must be a certain way and, by contrast, we can never expect to step out of being that certain way. We had been taught that this is law over and over again.
If you’re a white female you get to be a princess. If you’re a black female you get to be belligerent and sassy-mouthed. If you’re a Hispanic female you get to be round, chubby, short and having five kids and a husband. If you’re an Asian female, you get to be a squealing Harajuku girl. If you’re an Asian male, you get to be a Kato to the Green Hornet. If you’re a Middle Eastern female, you get to be sexually, politically and socially suppressed in a hijab or burka. If you’re a Middle Eastern male, you get to be a foreign terrorist that Tony Stark has to take down.
And if you’re a white male you get to be front and center as, well…anything you can possibly imagine. The doors are all open for you and damned if anyone-least of all Hollywood-is going to tell you ‘no’.
These examples that I mentioned, whether they make you laugh or make you cry (or both) all relate to stereotypes brought upon us by society. Or, better yet, we can only be the sum of how society perceives our skin color, our race, our ethnicity, our gender, our age, our socioeconomic class, etc. We are never allowed to be the sum of what we dream and/or choose to be.
People of color and non-male status are especially burdened with this expectation. I remember that as a child, I couldn’t imagine myself discovering and exploring tombs like Indiana Jones. I couldn’t imagine myself vanquishing energy-stealing, Earth-hating villains back to the Negaverse like Sailor Moon.* I couldn’t imagine myself owning a big red dog named Clifford like Emily Elizabeth Howell.
I couldn’t imagine myself being and/or doing any of those things because the people inside that TV and on that movie screen didn’t look anything like me. People that were like me were so easily put into a tiny little box where they had to act out their stereotypes while being either accessories to the main [white, often male] characters, breathing background props that had to be saved by said main characters, or villains against said main characters. The excitement that I felt upon seeing a fellow minority character was often quelled because, even from a young age, I could almost guess what role that minority character would be filling.
And so I didn’t believe that I could go on adventures and rescue someone and build a company and gain superpowers and wear princess dresses and fly a space shuttle…
…Because none of the people in the media that were doing those things looked anything like me.
And so, therein laid an implicit but strong message: we who are not white and not preferably male can only be limited to that which society perceives and stereotypes us. We are only allowed to be content with being part of a stereotypical monolith that must be at the whims of the privileged group that is allowed more room for diversity in their representation.
The damage that this paradigm has caused has been far and wide. It has caused everything from lack of and/or low self-esteem to fluctuating crime rates and drop-out rates to broken families.
Media and its messages are incredibly powerful-often much, much more powerful than we’re comfortable accepting.
And this is where my message to HEA comes in. This is where I want to say thank you to HEA. My thank you is endlessly deep, sincere, and heartfelt. And the thank you that I so deeply give neither is nor ever will be enough for what you have done.
I thank you for acknowledging, addressing, and, in your way, correcting the problem of underrepresentation and misrepresentation of colored and female people. You did so in the most creative, imaginative, revolutionary way possible. You did so by targeting the audience that is most vulnerable to sometimes-subtle, always-powerful mainstream messages-children.
I thank you for asserting an often forgotten reality in place of a too-easily-accepted fantasy. That is, the reality that our dreams and aspirations and goals and interests and general personhood have nothing to do with our ethnicity/race, and/or gender. You have asserted that reality over the fantasy of the cage-the cage that makes us believe that we are no more than the sums of qualities and attributes that we cannot help (race, ethnicity, gender, etc.), though they are qualities that, nonetheless, we should be proud of.
I thank you for showcasing and uplifting non-white cultures, rather than appropriating and stereotyping them. You have centered people of color and asserted that they are more than worthy and capable of telling their own stories. More than that, you have asserted that they are worthy and capable of telling and being in any story. You understood the difference between the grievance of whitewashing characters (Lawrence Olivier’s “Othello”) and the progress of diversifying characters (HEA itself) to prove the point about misrepresentation and appropriation.
I thank you for showcasing that to be female and to be powerful are not mutually exclusive things. You have shown female characters that are innovative, resourceful, creative, and badass. You have shown those strong female characters to revel in and embrace their femaleness and, in doing so, to reject the notion that maleness is the standard of strength and femaleness is the standard of weakness. These female characters may wear lipstick, have long hair, walk in high heels, and/or wear jewelry as they take the world on; they do not Dress Up As Men in an attempt to denote their worth in a misogynistic society. And you have shown them doing that with pride and fearlessness.
I thank you for showcasing that females of color are beautiful. More specifically, that females of color with different body types are beautiful. You have shown females that are wide-hipped, tall, thin, short, large-breasted, curvy, long-armed, and the like. Curly hair, long hair, dark hair, frizzy hair, natural hair, short hair, and the like. You have shown women’s bodies with respect and within the context that all bodies are real bodies; one woman is not A Real Woman compared to another just because she happens to be a bit bigger (or smaller, as some would argue).
I thank you for asserting that people of color are worthy of and capable of love. You showed close, loving, nurturing familial units at every chance you got. As needed in stories, conflict may drive apart these families, but they come back together. You have shown that love can be-and is-expressed in a variety of ways through unique familial dynamics.
I thank you, overall, for doing what you have done for colored and female children all across the world. You have been-and are-a voice that has advocated for them to feel important, centralized, capable, achieving, and human. You have humanized these children into people that have the rights and capabilities to dream and go wherever it is that they wish to go. Anyone can be Cinderella. Anyone can be the Princess and/or the Pauper. Anyone can be Robin Hood. Anyone can be The Little Mermaid. Anyone can be anything they want and the way they look should not be a barrier to that. Rather, those attitudes and paradigms must be transcended and you have asserted that wonderfully.
So thank you, Happily Ever After Series. In the year 2013, thank you so, so much.
*Please, no one get me wrong. I love Sailor Moon more than anyone. But I have to go to http://www.dolldivine.com/sailor-senshi-maker.php to create a black sailor scout for myself. Seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happily_Ever_After:_Fairy_Tales_for_Every_Child (1)
http://www.hbofamily.com/programs/happily-ever-after.html (2)
So! Does anyone remember or has anyone at least heard of HBO Family’s Happily Ever After Series? It was a series that ran from 1995-2000 (1). It was narrated by the phenomenal Robert Guillame and was made of three seasons. Famous actors, actresses, and singers that helped to voice the show range from Whoopi Goldberg and Gladys Knight to B.D Wong and Maria Conchita Alonso. Here’s a little summary/refresher straight from the website itself, lovelies (2):
"Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales For Every Child" is a series which retells the world's most famous fairy tales with a cast of animated characters from many ethnic backgrounds. For the first time ever, children of different races will find themselves represented as the royalty, fairies, and folk of the fairy tale world. The charm and mystery of the original tales are enhanced by this diverse spectrum of cultures. As the title suggests, these are truly fairy tales for every child.
And that’s basically the gist of what Happily Ever After (I’ll abbreviate it HEA from here) is all about: respectfully and enthusiastically taking ethnic-as well as female-minorities and putting them in the spotlight that has long-since been granted only to white majorities. Here are just a few of the wonderful examples:
Robin Hood is a Mexican female: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAh4A1oe7nc
Ali Baba is female. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib3xlMr9HV0
The Little Mermaid is an Asian. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG0m6wif36U
The Twelve Dancing Princesses are African. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gyNwGlG3Mo
King Midas is African, as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLGkkTwjCcs
Did I mention that Robin Hood is a Mexican female?
Even where representation of race and gender isn’t a problem, HEA still changes it up. For example, Aladdin is traditionally an Arabic male-he is a minority. But HEA shows his story in the form of an Asian male: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8wRxyCi_eQ
One could easily say that HEA is showing all kinds of ethnicities in all kinds of fairy tales (over thirty-nine have been adapted by the show) to keep the audience engaged and coming back for more.
But I believe that there is a deep message in there. And I believe that that message is very, very deep and very, very wonderful.
To explain what I think that message is and where I think that message comes from, I’ll step outside of HEA and into mainstream culture for a moment. From a very, very young age-deliberately or not-our culture tells us that because we look a certain way, then we must be a certain way and, by contrast, we can never expect to step out of being that certain way. We had been taught that this is law over and over again.
If you’re a white female you get to be a princess. If you’re a black female you get to be belligerent and sassy-mouthed. If you’re a Hispanic female you get to be round, chubby, short and having five kids and a husband. If you’re an Asian female, you get to be a squealing Harajuku girl. If you’re an Asian male, you get to be a Kato to the Green Hornet. If you’re a Middle Eastern female, you get to be sexually, politically and socially suppressed in a hijab or burka. If you’re a Middle Eastern male, you get to be a foreign terrorist that Tony Stark has to take down.
And if you’re a white male you get to be front and center as, well…anything you can possibly imagine. The doors are all open for you and damned if anyone-least of all Hollywood-is going to tell you ‘no’.
These examples that I mentioned, whether they make you laugh or make you cry (or both) all relate to stereotypes brought upon us by society. Or, better yet, we can only be the sum of how society perceives our skin color, our race, our ethnicity, our gender, our age, our socioeconomic class, etc. We are never allowed to be the sum of what we dream and/or choose to be.
People of color and non-male status are especially burdened with this expectation. I remember that as a child, I couldn’t imagine myself discovering and exploring tombs like Indiana Jones. I couldn’t imagine myself vanquishing energy-stealing, Earth-hating villains back to the Negaverse like Sailor Moon.* I couldn’t imagine myself owning a big red dog named Clifford like Emily Elizabeth Howell.
I couldn’t imagine myself being and/or doing any of those things because the people inside that TV and on that movie screen didn’t look anything like me. People that were like me were so easily put into a tiny little box where they had to act out their stereotypes while being either accessories to the main [white, often male] characters, breathing background props that had to be saved by said main characters, or villains against said main characters. The excitement that I felt upon seeing a fellow minority character was often quelled because, even from a young age, I could almost guess what role that minority character would be filling.
And so I didn’t believe that I could go on adventures and rescue someone and build a company and gain superpowers and wear princess dresses and fly a space shuttle…
…Because none of the people in the media that were doing those things looked anything like me.
And so, therein laid an implicit but strong message: we who are not white and not preferably male can only be limited to that which society perceives and stereotypes us. We are only allowed to be content with being part of a stereotypical monolith that must be at the whims of the privileged group that is allowed more room for diversity in their representation.
The damage that this paradigm has caused has been far and wide. It has caused everything from lack of and/or low self-esteem to fluctuating crime rates and drop-out rates to broken families.
Media and its messages are incredibly powerful-often much, much more powerful than we’re comfortable accepting.
And this is where my message to HEA comes in. This is where I want to say thank you to HEA. My thank you is endlessly deep, sincere, and heartfelt. And the thank you that I so deeply give neither is nor ever will be enough for what you have done.
I thank you for acknowledging, addressing, and, in your way, correcting the problem of underrepresentation and misrepresentation of colored and female people. You did so in the most creative, imaginative, revolutionary way possible. You did so by targeting the audience that is most vulnerable to sometimes-subtle, always-powerful mainstream messages-children.
I thank you for asserting an often forgotten reality in place of a too-easily-accepted fantasy. That is, the reality that our dreams and aspirations and goals and interests and general personhood have nothing to do with our ethnicity/race, and/or gender. You have asserted that reality over the fantasy of the cage-the cage that makes us believe that we are no more than the sums of qualities and attributes that we cannot help (race, ethnicity, gender, etc.), though they are qualities that, nonetheless, we should be proud of.
I thank you for showcasing and uplifting non-white cultures, rather than appropriating and stereotyping them. You have centered people of color and asserted that they are more than worthy and capable of telling their own stories. More than that, you have asserted that they are worthy and capable of telling and being in any story. You understood the difference between the grievance of whitewashing characters (Lawrence Olivier’s “Othello”) and the progress of diversifying characters (HEA itself) to prove the point about misrepresentation and appropriation.
I thank you for showcasing that to be female and to be powerful are not mutually exclusive things. You have shown female characters that are innovative, resourceful, creative, and badass. You have shown those strong female characters to revel in and embrace their femaleness and, in doing so, to reject the notion that maleness is the standard of strength and femaleness is the standard of weakness. These female characters may wear lipstick, have long hair, walk in high heels, and/or wear jewelry as they take the world on; they do not Dress Up As Men in an attempt to denote their worth in a misogynistic society. And you have shown them doing that with pride and fearlessness.
I thank you for showcasing that females of color are beautiful. More specifically, that females of color with different body types are beautiful. You have shown females that are wide-hipped, tall, thin, short, large-breasted, curvy, long-armed, and the like. Curly hair, long hair, dark hair, frizzy hair, natural hair, short hair, and the like. You have shown women’s bodies with respect and within the context that all bodies are real bodies; one woman is not A Real Woman compared to another just because she happens to be a bit bigger (or smaller, as some would argue).
I thank you for asserting that people of color are worthy of and capable of love. You showed close, loving, nurturing familial units at every chance you got. As needed in stories, conflict may drive apart these families, but they come back together. You have shown that love can be-and is-expressed in a variety of ways through unique familial dynamics.
I thank you, overall, for doing what you have done for colored and female children all across the world. You have been-and are-a voice that has advocated for them to feel important, centralized, capable, achieving, and human. You have humanized these children into people that have the rights and capabilities to dream and go wherever it is that they wish to go. Anyone can be Cinderella. Anyone can be the Princess and/or the Pauper. Anyone can be Robin Hood. Anyone can be The Little Mermaid. Anyone can be anything they want and the way they look should not be a barrier to that. Rather, those attitudes and paradigms must be transcended and you have asserted that wonderfully.
So thank you, Happily Ever After Series. In the year 2013, thank you so, so much.
*Please, no one get me wrong. I love Sailor Moon more than anyone. But I have to go to http://www.dolldivine.com/sailor-senshi-maker.php to create a black sailor scout for myself. Seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happily_Ever_After:_Fairy_Tales_for_Every_Child (1)
http://www.hbofamily.com/programs/happily-ever-after.html (2)
