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Mommy, Why Cant I Have Blond Hair and Blue Eyes?

With Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the fore of our minds, we at Modern Mom would like to share with you the writings of author Mallika Chopra. In this excerpt from her most recent book, 100 Questions from My Child, Mallika finds a gentle way to talk to her young daughters, Tara, 6, and Leela, 3, about race and class, two issues central to Dr. King’s life mission.

Why Can’t I Have Blond Hair and Blue Eyes?

One afternoon, Tara’s friend came home from school upset. She cried, “Mommy, why can’t I have blond hair and blue eyes?” Tara’s friend was South Asian – a pretty girl with thick black hair, beautiful dark eyes, and lovely brown skin.

Her mother held her, wondering what had happened to create this outburst. So her mother asserted how beautiful she was, and that she looked just as she was meant to be.

But the question continued for the next few days. After some prying, her friend’s mother deducted that during dress-up at school, another girl had told her daughter that she couldn’t be a princess, because she did not have blond hair and blue eyes. After all, the girls considered Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty the most beautiful princesses, and they had fair skin, blue eyes and blond hair. 

I realized in our household, as well, Tara had identified with these classic, blond-haired, blue-eyed princesses. Tara did not care much for Disney’s latest attempts with multicultural princesses – Mulan and Pocahontas—because neither of them wore the long flowing dresses, like the other ones. For Tara, it was about the beautiful clothes that these girls wore – for now, she could be a princess by wearing those clothes. For Tara’s friend, it had become about the color of their skin, hair and eyes -- but she could not change those aspects of herself.

This experience stressed to me how much media and pop culture define our sense of self, starting at a very early age. While, as South Asian parents, we made bold attempts to give our children a sense of pride in their Indian heritage – through movies and clothes, festivals, travel and gatherings with other children – we could not protect them from a dominant society that hinted they were not as good or pretty or special. The same was true of children who were black or East Asian. And the messages continued through the depiction of women with perfect faces and bodies in magazines and movies.

The girl at school was probably innocently commenting on her reality of princesses, not realizing how it hurt and excluded her friend who looked different. The interaction was a reminder for me about the importance of stressing, over and over again, day after day, to my daughters that we are all special and beautiful in our own way. I also decided to take responsibility to educate the other parents and children in our lives about such diversity by organizing cultural activities at school and inviting Tara and Leela’s families home for dinner. Perhaps it was one way that I could stress to my daughters and their friends that beauty comes in many guises.

Question for Your Child: If we could visit one new place in the world, where would you want to go?

Votes: 5

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