My toddler’s boredom with animation taught me the importance of inclusion

I never fully understood the power of a persons affinity towards their own race until my two year old son started watching movies.

My son really likes 3D animation and old school movies with kids as the lead like The Sandlot, Mighty Ducks, Little Rascals (90's revamp), and Honey I Shrunk the Kids.

Like most kids, he enjoys the Jim Henson shows, Barney, and get’s a kick out of documentaries with animals, especially those featuring cats!

One day I decided to let him see one of my favorite childhood animations, Robin Harris’s Bebe’s Kids. I hit play and within the first 30 seconds of the film my son’s face lit up in a way I never seen before when he watched a movie.

He was dancing to the rap scene, clapping his little hands, laughing out loud throughout the movie, and sitting with a plastered jovial trance on his face.

Was he hype because he saw the excitement on his daddy’s face? Or maybe it was something more about this movie he enjoyed.

The engineer in me decided to do a little experiment.

I searched out other family appropriate movies and sitcoms that depicted black people in the lead. I introduced him to Robert Townsend’s Meteor Man, a film about a black substitute teacher who received super powers from a meteor and decided to clean up his neighborhood by taking down crack houses and gangs.

He sat and watched the whole thing without getting distracted, except for when I covered his eyes when Townsend’s character was struck by the meteor?—?a little too graphic for a toddler.

At Target I found a DVD set of old late 80’s and early 90’s movies. Bill Cosby’s Ghost Dad was on it. He was cracking up laughing at the antics of Mr. Jello Pudding.

In time we started to watch Black-ish on Hulu which is now one of our favorite TV shows.

We dug through Netflix and I introduced him to A Different World and again he was transfixed, smiling and laughing at the awkwardness of the Hillman College students. We soon watched Home and of course he thoroughly enjoyed it.

How can a child with a 20 word vocabulary be so engaged with these movies and cartoons?

Phase two of the experiment

Over the weeks, I decided to go beyond the screen and get into some books. I went to Amazon and purchased him books like Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee’s Please Baby Please, Jabari Asim’s Whose Toes Are Those, Taye Diggs Chocolate Me, Laban Carrick Hill’s When The Beat Was Born, and a few other stories that had black children as the main characters.

When story time rolls around he sits grinning like the Cheshire Cat, pointing at the characters, listening attentively instead of being easily distracted like when his mother and I would try reading “classic stories” or Dr. Seuss books. We thought his attention span was short because he is so young, but now we realize that maybe he wasn’t interested in the timeless classics, which often depicted either animals or white children being all merry go lucky.

While my son may engage with animal characters, muppets, Disney and Pixar movies?—?he comes to life when he see’s black characters.

Through him I come to realize how truly important it is for developing children to see images that are reflective of their likeness.

What type of message are young children receiving when they rarely see characters that look like them?

What seems to be trivial, watching cartoons, can foster a sense of negative self-esteem. Children may subconsciously say to themselves?—?Am I not beautiful enough to be a princess? Am I not strong enough to save Santa Claus? Why are white people always the hero?

What has started as an innocent movie, stimulating their imagination, over time transcends into their conscious mind and thought.

White dolls are prettier than the black dolls. White people are rich, black people only live in the ghetto. White people are good, blacks are evil. Black people can only be rappers and athletes...engineering is for white dudes and Asians.

I recall my thoughts as a kid. Regardless of the fact I was raised with a strong sense of self, pride in my race, and was taught the history and legacy of my ancestors?—?I would still question and wonder if I was deserving enough to matter.

Reflecting on this now, it hurts.

I believed white people were better. My family never told me this. In fact no one ever directly said this to me, but the world around me, through images and messages, did.

Most of my comic book hero’s I admired where white men. It wasn’t until I got older I discovered The Black Panther, Luke Cage, or Omega Man.

Majority of the bad ass action stars were white dudes and the black guys were always the thugs who got their assess handed to them by Steven Segal. If not the thug, they were the weak, comic relief, sidekick that died in the first 20 minutes.

As a kid, one of my favorite movies was Passenger 57 starring Wesley Snipes. It wasn’t the worlds greatest movie by any means. It ran rampant with cheesy 90's one liners and obvious stunt men?—?but he kicked ass, on a plane, pulled the beautiful sista at the end, and said, “Always Bet On Black!” Sounds silly, but as a 7-year-old kid, that line was empowering! Every kid on the playground was saying that line.

We all know that media impacts us, but do we ever wonder how early it starts? We know TV, movies, and music can lead to aggressive behavior in kids, but can’t it also teach kid’s a sense of superiority and privilege or inferiority and handicap?

I doubt white families have to deal with this because mostly everything is geared toward their likeness. If we are talking animations, children’s movies, and books damn near every thing is filled with white characters. Most stories are culturally relevant for a white child and often alienates children from different backgrounds. The problem lies in the fact that there is no diversity, balance, or many options for children of color.

Saying it’s important for kids to see themselves in a positive light in cartoons or as leads in movies and in books is an understatement. For their psychological development I believe it is vital.

This same phenomenon my son has showed me in our family experiment has direct correlation to people in the workplace.

Seeing a black person in a position of power at a Fortune 500 company plants a seed in an individuals mind that they too can get to that position one day.

Seeing a proud LGBTQ person as a senior leader within a company may serve as encouragement for that young junior level gay guy in accounting, letting him know it’s okay to be his full-self at work and not feel pressured to hide his sexuality.

Seeing a Ginny Rometty, CEO of IBM, at the helm of one of the most innovative companies on the planet can inspire a young girl who has an interest in technology.

Discovering an Aisha Bowe, may push a little black girl to believe she can someday work at NASA, then start her own business.

All kids deserve the opportunity to see themselves as heroes, princesses, and leaders. We need more culturally relevant stories that reflect the realities of our multicultural world?—?and not in the corny, often stereotypical, Disney way.

My son doesn’t mind seeing white characters in his cartoons, but I see he is drawn to characters that look more like him. His reaction to seeing black characters in cartoons, movies, and in books is a natural reaction and attraction to someone that looks familiar. This is irrefutable proof that inclusion matters.

People say that kids don’t understand the concept of race, which I used to believe, but after this experiment I’m no longer sure if that notion holds merit.

My son may not know what a black person, white person, or any color person is?— but even at two years old, he understands there is a difference.

Affinity towards your race matters. Inclusion matters. Cultural relevance matters. My baby boy has made me fully understand how important these concepts are to all people including little kids.

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 Louis Byrd is the Principal and Cultural Brand Strategist at Mellie Blue Branding. 

 Mellie Blue is a cross-cultural brand consultancy that helps engineering and tech companies enhance their brand systems with cultural competence and intelligence.