Through high school and college, where many of my peers had absorbed those same stereotypes and racially exclusive beauty standards, I clung to my stance, and it served me well. Because black women were largely denied the cultural portrayals that seemed to define femininity, scoffing at those characterizations was freeing. It allowed me to take pride in being erased from the entertainment I consumed. Instead of feeling tossed aside, I let myself feel affirmed.

Whenever I heard a radio segment or read an essay about how feminists were discouraging their daughters from idolizing princesses so that they wouldn’t grow up with the wrong goals and the wrong values, I was validated all over again.

So how did I get from there to being a 37-year-old woman who plans to wake at 7 a.m. next Saturday to watch Meghan Markle wed Prince Harry?

It happened as a result of my slow realization that there were racial differences behind the eye-rolls at all things princess that I shared with fellow feminists. While white women have long denounced stereotypes that reduced them to their physical appearance, black beauty has historically not been acknowledged nor celebrated in the same way in mainstream American society. White women have been cast as weak and helpless, while black women are depicted as possessing a preternatural strength and animalistic physical prowess.

Because white womanhood has culturally been treated as the standard, white women are most at risk for being involuntarily defined as princesses, and denied their autonomy and strength.

That is, no doubt, infuriating. But I realized something: It hadn’t happened to me. I didn’t grow up feeling locked into the princess role, but rather locked out. And as I realized that, my anti-princess feminism began to give way to something more nuanced. Princess culture — the celebration of a fairy tale version of femininity and romance — damages girls because it offers a limited vision of the roles girls can play, but also because it offers a limited vision of which girls can play those roles.