It's not as big a deal as you're making it.

I was just talking with a long time friend of mine who is an Asian Men's Activist. I will say, he does good work. It was because of a campaign that he originated, that Daniel Dae Kim was one of People Magazine's sexiest men of the year a few years ago (and Daniel Dae Kim is VERY sexy, so that was a good pick!), and this friend has also raised awareness of the unbalanced representations of Asian men in the media at large. He does great, worthwhile, and difficult work. I appreciate what he is doing.

Sometimes things are taken a bit far and out of context, though. Today, he was talking about how he was really put off by a friend's recent vacation photos. This friend is an Asian woman who has a daughter, also 100% Asian. They had gone to Disney World, and the pictures, of course, included the daughter, who's probably a few years younger than Erin, posing with all the Disney Princesses. I mean, what else do little girls do at Disney World, right?

Of course, he saw something sinister in this. All the princesses are white. OK, first off, that's not true. Some of Erin's favorite princesses are Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, Mulan from Mulan (of course), and Jasmine from Aladdin. She likes a lot of other princesses, too, but if you ask her for her favorites, one of those three will always make the list. Now, for anyone who doesn't know, the ones I named are black, middle-eastern, and Chinese, respectively. Erin, of course, is white. She looks like Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty, or Belle. They are not her favorites, though.

Based on this, I really don't think little kids internalize this stuff on the level that some adults seem to think that they do. I'm sorry, but it is not harmful for a little Chinese girl to pose with Cinderella if that's her favorite princess any more than it would be for Erin to pose with Jasmine. Let's just say, not harmful at all. It's good childhood fun. People are taking this WAY too far if they think there's damage being done by that.

Here's the thing. A lot has changed for our kids. Back when I was a kid, it was definitely not all that acceptable in society at large to hang out with people of other races. It's different for Erin, though. She rarely hangs out with white kids! Of course, we've always lived in places where we are the minority, so that is really the law of probability in action. If you're in a place with a 55% black population like our old home in Georgia, then you will probably make more black friends than anything else. If you live here, where the population is 95% Hispanic, your friends will just about all be Hispanic. Pretty simple. Even so, Erin's friends of other races outnumber her white friends, no matter how it came about. If this were the 80's, she would hang with the two white kids in her school, and leave it at that. That's not the way it is anymore, though. The world has changed.

It's adults who are stuck in the past. It's adults who still see race first, and people second, and who carry the baggage of how crappy race relations really were when we were younger. Our job is not to make sure our kids are posing with the right color of Disney Princess, but to not pass our baggage along to them. Welcome friends of every race. Be positive. Show positive role models of your race and others. BE a positive role model. Don't let your daughter see you looking in the mirror at your fat with a disgusted face (Shut up. You know you've done it. We all have.) This will do more for long term identity and confidence than trying to keep the influence of the white washed media out.

For the record, I do believe the media is white washed and totally imbalanced. It's changing slowly. Remember, the media is run by adults, not our kids who are without the baggage. Still, look at all that has happened in the past 20 years. For every Long Duk Dong and incidence of "Yellowface" (think of Mickey Rooney's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's), there is a John Cho, a Daniel Dae Kim, a Chow Yun Fat. We adults are making progress, but slowly. Our kids are already there. Don't put our shit off on them. That's the important part.