If you ever finally felt represented on screen, you understand the importance.

Growing up I always wanted blonde hair, smaller facial features basically I wanted to look like Zoey from Zoey 101. Until a couple years ago I never really thought anything of it I just wanted straight blonde hair because it was pretty.

As a child you fail to realize you don’t see yourself as much in movies, cartoons or tv series because most of the main characters are white. For me coming from a mixed Latinx background I saw my culture represented sometimes, but it was always in a racist way. Think of all the Latinx characters you know, are they gardeners, gang members, illegal immigrants or maids? Most of the time yes. The crappy thing about Latinx representation is a lot of actors that play these characters in cartoons or on screen are 90% of the time, white actors. This is the least of the issues in the film making world, I for one have lighter skin compared to darker skinned Latinx people who will not see themselves relating to any main characters ever.

These of course are the least of the issues in the industry you see this time and time again with white actors getting casted for BIPOC roles.

Pixar’s Soul recently came out and was a huge hit, lots of people were happy because you finally had a main character who was black without being depicted in stereotypical ways. While the film moved many hearts it still fell into one repetitive issue, the character isn’t black the whole time. If you look at the most known black main characters in animation, are they ever black the whole time? Not likely. Look at Princess and The Frog, she’s a frog for almost the whole movie and like in Soul he is only a black man for 20% of the film. This doesn’t seem like that big of an issue but how many animated movies can you count where the white lead is themselves the whole movie, there’s a lot.

I’ve seen many conversations online of people tired that the black character is never black the whole time and while Soul has many things to celebrate in the film you can’t hold it against people to be tired of the same thing.

You start to really understand the importance of representation when BIPOC kids can relate to main characters or find someone that looks just like them. While this may be harder to understand if you aren’t BIPOC its good to understand the difference between representation or just plain racism.

I think the moment I felt “represented” and understood why it is so important was when Coco came out. I finally saw a kid and a family who weren’t gardeners or maids with names like José or Consuela. Instead, I saw the story of a kid following his dream but struggles with family traditions at the same time. Although not being Mexican myself, I was able to relate to scenes or beliefs in the film which was comforting.

We are getting a little better at representation, but we still have a long way to go. The biggest thing to note is that we are not whitewashing these characters or depicting them in stereotypical ways. Just cast more coloured people! Animate more coloured characters! Stop making white the default!