I didn’t realize until now, but growing up I was attached to characters that I thought looked like me. When I really little, I always loved barbies with black hair and dark eyes because I thought they looked like me. There wasn’t a lot of them to begin with when I was a kid, but my favorite barbies were black barbies with curly hair because, as a kid, I was like, “Look! She has curly hair like me!” And my God Mother (who is African American) would be like, “Yup! She looks like you and me!” (I legit thought that I was a third African-American as a kid because my God Mother kept telling me I was because of an inside family joke-- that’s another story though). Then they started straightening their hair and became even harder and harder to find barbies with dark hair and eyes and naturally looking curly hair like mine, and I just remember just being disappointed and sad.
When I’d watch T.V shows, I always tended to like the female characters who were had dark hair like me-- and if they had dark eyes, the better. (And then if they had dark complected skin, I’d think of my God Mother, or of my Grandma on my dad’s side, which I was like, “Cool!”). And, as a kid, if they had dark hair, I automatically thought they were ethnically mixed-- like me. Even more so-- I automatically assumed they were half Mexican like me sometimes. (Boy, you couldn’t believe how excited I was when I rewatched Dragon Tales, and realized that they were, in fact, at least Half to Full Mexican). Later, even if they were not of Mexican Ethnicity-- whether they were Asian, Indigenous, Polynesian, African-Americnan, Middle Eastern, or maybe they were White-- as long as they had dark complexions, I always thought, “They look like me!”
I didn’t realize these things until I was older, and I went to look back at all my favorite childhood shows, and I noticed a trend. I didn’t really notice how much the idea of representation affected the toys I picked, characters I liked, and so on. (The only exceptions was Red hair, Anne of Green Gables was my favorite book). But yeah....It’s just an interesting thing to look back on.
