Sorry about submitting this story but it’s much to long for ask and I just had to tell someone and this blog seems like the perfect place for it. This is just another story clearly showing how whitewashing and the whole “white being default” in hollywood and such things is extremely harmful, it’s sort of along the same lines as the which baby doll is prettier thing. Okay so, I’ve been volunteering at the elementary school that my mother works at to boost my resume in the future and I’ve spent most my time in the art room. Well the first week in art we did a simple task for the first day back in art class, drawing portraits and this week we painted them in. We of course put all the basic colors on the table to paint with black, white, red, blue, etc. We also put a few basic skin tone options we had a peach out and a light, medium and a dark brown. In one class I noticed something strange happening a little white girl giving the brown paint to a little black girl to paint her skin and I saw the black girl refuse it. The little black girl refused to color in her skin and after that I started noticing something very troublesome a lot of the little black children(particularly the little girls) were not painting their skin in, at all. They just left the white paper. So I started talking to some of the children asking them to color in their skin, they’d always refuse or say they didn’t want to. I’d tell them things like “but you have such pretty skin, don’t you want to paint it?” and they’d still say they didn’t want to, one girl even responded to me by saying her skin isn’t pretty “not like yours”(me, a white woman) it broke my heart and I tried to tell her it wasn’t true that her skin was beautiful but she wasn’t having it. It was so sad. I’d say over half the black children didn’t paint their skin in and the rest of them all chose the lightest brown no matter what shade their skin actually was. Also another thing that I’m not really sure if it’s problematic or not but I noticed a lot of the little black girls wouldn’t draw their hair in braids(which all the little black girls hair are in some kind of braid) and they’d draw it down and straight, not curly, not wavy, straight as bone. I asked a few of them why they didn’t draw their hair in braids(or at least curly) and they all said because straight hair is prettier, some of the girls told me because they wanted their hair to be like mine or the teachers(thin and straight) and some of them refereed to it as “good hair” I wasn’t really sure what they meant by that but it obviously meant that they thought straight hair was better then what I’m sure is their naturally curly hair. That’s just my story, I’m not sure if it’s something you’d actually post but I thought it was something interesting to known and something you could say to all those people who say whitewashing “isn’t a big deal” Today has been so heart wrenching for me, I of course knew whitewashing was a problem but I have never seen the problem of it being executed so strongly before my very eyes. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever really actually seen an example of it happening in person but now that I have, it’s like I understand it so much better. Really seeing it happen, really hearing these adorable little girls saying they think they think they’re ugly or they they think they’d be prettier if they were white. It’s just so heartbreaking. I didn’t know what to do, I wish there was something I could have said to them to change how they feel but there are just no words, not when they keep saying “I’m wrong” or that “I’m prettier” or that “it looks better the way it is”(not colored in) it was like I was grasping at straws, there was just nothing I could say to change the way they feel and I hated it, I hated that these kindergarteners and first graders already feel this way. It’s so disgusting and how people can ignore the problem is beyond me!