Had an interesting/sad realization about being POCin America and Jane Eyre yesterday. Jane Eyre was SO important to me as a teen because I felt so akin to her - she, like me (or so I thought) was plain, ugly, obscure 1/

Only the thing is, the only reason I was so deeply convinced I was plain and ugly was because I was brown and an immigrant daughter and everything in the world around me convinced me those things were incompatible with beauty 2/

My teen daughter just read Jane Eyre for a school summer thing so she, her older brother and I watched the recent movie together. I realized neither kid felt THAT close to this book because neither has been hammered with that racist message about beauty like I had been 3/

They had always felt they were deserving of love, beautiful which makes me happy for them and as a mom, but sad for little past me who got this message about brown skin being ugly so Ingrained it took years to unlearn it. Let’s not let more generations of kids feel this way.