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I'm not even going to pretend to understand what is going on around Doja Cat, but I will say this: Anti-blackness and misogynoir are so prevalent that it's important for parents to intervene with their kids as early as possible to insure their self-esteem isn't destroyed.
I can remember as a kid I loved to color and draw and my mother would buy me these Barbie brand coloring books. And because Barbie was white on the cover, I colored all the Barbies on the inside white. Because I thought that's what I was supposed to do.
My father noticed this and rather than get upset or make a scene or yell at me, he did something really ingenious. He asked if he could color with me.
I was so happy my daddy wanted to color with me, I of course obliged.
My father then took the brown and black crayons and colored in his Barbie as black and showed it to me. "Isn't she pretty?" he asked.
And my eyes got big and it clicked. I didn't have to automatically color Barbie white. I could make her any color I wanted. I could make her look like me.
I told my father that I agreed that his Barbie, who was black, was beautiful. And from then on I colored all my people black in coloring books or when I made drawings.
I can't say enough what it meant to me for my father, a black man who I thought hung the moon as a child, to tell me I was beautiful and being black was beautiful.
It's stayed with me all my life and to this day I carry myself with confidence because of it. I want all little black girls to get the same validation, especially from their fathers.
Both my parents fought hard to make sure we all had a strong sense of identity. Every Christmas time my mom would make my father search for black dolls for me and my sisters.
So, again, don't really know what's going on with Doja...at all, but all the convo seems to be around self-hate, which depressingly does happen a lot. And that often starts at home.
And you can't under-estimate the effect parents have in shaping a child's identity and self-esteem. It's more powerful than TV and magazines in the end.
I know in my case, no seductive facet of "mainstream" culture was stronger than my father's love for me.
