Detangling the Myth of Colorblindness in ‘Cinderella’

Talking about the fantasy of racial colorblindness, for me, starts with talking about hair.

Black hair, specifically. I remember hearing from an early age that my natural hair had to be “tamed,” like some wild creature that could lash out if given the chance. All the women I knew—from my mom to my favorite characters on TV—straightened their hair, seemingly a rite of passage into womanhood and sophistication. So once I was finally allowed to get my hair flat ironed, I faithfully went back to the salon every three weeks for twelve years, and I wore bandanas to cover up any hint of curl when my edges betrayed me between sessions.

Even once I realized years later how much flat ironing harmed my hair, I never could quite bring myself to do the big chop. When I stopped using heat, I began to research how to better care for my hair texture, but I still flinched away from the idea of cutting it all off and growing out my unavoidably, uncontainably curly hair. Why couldn’t I just start fresh?

Before I had the language to understand race, I had been told by my immigrant parents and well-meaning white adults alike that my achievements meant no one could make me feel different. But I was embarrassed when I was allowed one sleepover at thirteen and had to wear a bonnet in front of my non-Black friends. I was ashamed that the generic stage makeup they used made me look gray when I got a role in the school play. Going out in public with my Afro was unthinkable. Yet when I couldn’t put words to the nagging sense of difference beyond the physicality of hair and skin color, I eventually convinced myself that I could ignore it. After all, what was on the outside wasn’t supposed to matter.

The funny thing about so-called colorblindness: The word doesn’t mean the sum of its parts. I wasn’t blind to color; I knew what I looked like. I was ignorant of race as a concept that encompassed but went beyond my physical body. I had no words for what being Black meant.

It was no coincidence that at the same time, I threw myself into loving fantasy stories. Dreaming of worlds that never were, and worlds that could be, was a way for me to avoid the reality in which I felt inexplicably ill at ease with both my white peers and my extended family who had chosen not to assimilate to the same extent that I had. If fantasy was the genre of desire, I desperately desired to be one of the daydreamers and the “different” characters who were revealed to be the chosen ones—part of a grand destiny that retroactively explained their alienation.

Blackness doesn’t disappear if you pretend not to see it.

The beating heart of all of those fantasies was their self-professed colorblindness that reinforced the colorblindness I had been taught. Fantasy claimed outright to be outside of time and history, let alone skin color. Real, material histories of oppression weren’t supposed to apply in worlds that had magic, talking animals, and perfectly sized glass slippers. And for me, one of the earliest pieces of media that taught me how to dream “beyond” race was the 1997 made-for-television adaptation of the 1957 musical Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

The film boasted a Black princess and a racially diverse cast and, in theory, should have done the opposite of uphold internalized racism. At the time, my other favorite fantasy adaptations, A Wrinkle in Time and The Chronicles of Narnia, had all-white casts, and I had struggled with the fact that these wildly magical alternate worlds could imagine dragons and interdimensional travel but not desirable Black girls. But with Brandy’s Cinderella, instead of having to force myself into white narratives by telling myself that it was enough to relate to characteristics “beyond” skin color (cleverness, shyness, bravery, ambition), here was a Black girl protagonist, and a princess at that! Representation! Rejoice!

And I did rejoice, which is what made this movie so formative for me. Watching a girl who looked like me as Cinderella was one of the first times I understood the intoxicating effect of visibility. To see a Black girl in a classic fairytale—arguably the most prominent fairytale that defined desirability in the American mainstream—was absolutely magical.

But the magic of Cinderella was magic I took at face value. Colorblindness relies entirely on visibility, the ability of an actor of color to be seen, and for that visibility to pass as representation. At no point do Brandy or any of the other Black women in the cast identify as Black in the story, nor are they referred to as such.

In fact, the only time race and identity come up is when Cinderella daydreams in the song “In My Own Little Corner,” in which she escapes into fantasies of other countries and cultures. She dreams of being “a thief in Calcutta,” “a queen in Peru,” and (cringingly) “a huntress on an African safari.” Cinderella is dreaming of the very fantasy I learned from this movie and from colorblind depictions in general: I could escape feeling alienated as long as I viewed myself outside of not just my own specific embodied racial identity, but the idea of race in general.

Still, is the movie’s colorblindness that bad if Brandy, Whitney Houston, Whoopi Goldberg, and the other members of the cast gave absolutely iconic performances that I adore to this day? I thought of my own world: How could colorblindness be that bad if in those primarily white spaces I still got good grades, joined clubs, and got awards, “regardless” of my race?

The issue isn’t that the cast isn’t phenomenal. Of course, talented Black people will thrive when given any and every opportunity. Of course, the movie is beautiful and well-executed. I watched and rewatched this movie too many times to count, and now that it’s streaming on Disney+ I’ve already rewatched it twice more. It’s by far my favorite Cinderella adaptation. The issue is: What is lost in a story that chooses to make Brandy a princess and Whitney Houston a fairy godmother despite their Blackness, not because of it?

And we do know it was intended to be despite their Blackness. Providing a remarkable wealth of insight behind the scenes, Kendra James’s 2017 oral history of the movie interviews many of the movie’s cast and crew, including executive producer Debra Martin Chase, a Black woman, and executive producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan and writer Robert Freedman, all white men. There’s a lot to unpack in this interview, but from the beginning it’s clear that these creators had contradictory aims. Chase’s quotes reveal that she made this movie thinking of Black audiences; not only does she explicitly say Brandy is a Cinderella of color, but she indicates the importance of seeing her own identity. The other three, on the other hand, spend the interview applauding themselves for their “colorblindness” in shaping their production.

Where the word blind in colorblind might imply an inability to see, they are intentionally refusing to look at the specificities of the racial identities they were casting. According to their interview, Whitney Houston can’t just be a Black female icon of mainstream popular culture; she has to be popular in the mainstream “as opposed to being defined by her race.” They mention their diverse cast, but Freedman claims he didn’t want to write “multiculturally,” even though writing “multiculturally” (although a flawed term that flattens race in most other contexts) would indicate some acknowledgment of racial specificity.

In her article “A Black Cast Doesn’t Make a Black Show,” Kristen J. Warner explains that “colorblind casting” technically fulfills the vaguely defined goals of diversity and inclusion. However, because so few marginalized voices are in the writers’ room, let alone directors or executive producers, these Black characters are written to simply ignore the significance of their embodied identity—just like I had grown up ignoring mine.

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Cinderella is not the first production to employ “colorblind” casting. It is, however, one of the few early productions to have such a detailed oral history that shows how thoroughly that colorblindness was intentional. Later in Kendra James’s oral history, Neil Meron explains that he “decided that it would be terrific for one stepdaughter to be white and one daughter be black just to further hit home that color is irrelevant in this fantasy world.” Craig Zadan emphasizes that “what [they] did very purposefully” was create an oversaturated production, where “the image on screen [had] so much color in it—primary colors especially—that the skin colors almost dissipated.” He attributes this intentional obscuring of color to his desire to “make sure that our diverse vision wasn’t so obvious that it became self-conscious and try-hard.”

But those explanations come across as incredibly self-conscious. In trying to avoid acknowledging racial difference, all of these executive producers reveal themselves to be overly aware of color, while paradoxically also “not looking.” Blackness doesn’t disappear if you pretend not to see it.

To be clear, race isn’t solely about biology and skin color. What makes me Black isn’t just my hair and my brown skin, and Blackness isn’t defined solely by marginalization. But my hair and my brown skin are part of how I move in the world as a Black person. Before I understood what being Black in white spaces meant, I knew that white ladies followed me around if I spent too long in the expensive stores at the mall. I knew I didn’t sunburn if I went to the beach, and that I’d have to make excuses as to why I couldn’t make plans on wash day.

In the same way, having a movie that doesn’t mention race or color doesn’t change that Brandy, Whitney, Natalie, and Whoopi all visibly move through the movie as Black women. It doesn’t change the impact of now-racist lyrics in “In My Own Little Corner” and “Stepsisters’ Lament” that had to be changed (i.e. “a young Norwegian princess” becomes “a young Egyptian princess,” and Cinderella’s neck is no longer “white as a swan”).

It doesn’t even change that, like Debra Martin Chase says, the significance of Cinderella is that majority-Black central cast, and that the production was, and is still, beloved by a wide audience of both Black and non-Black people alike.

However, the inability to acknowledge the visible Blackness of Black women does marginalize the real Black people, like Natalie Desselle (who played the stepsister Minerva), playing those characters. In the oral history, Meron and Zadan jokingly discuss their nonchalance when Natalie needed a Black hairdresser, even as they then called on Debra Martin Chase to fix it (“Debra, help!”). They “cannot see” Blackness just long enough to fail to meet the needs of Black women, but then they can suddenly see Blackness in order to call a Black woman to fix the problem.

If colorblindness was what it claimed to be—blindness to color—then even those considerations would have never happened. Colorblindness, and colorblind casting, are always intentional decisions to look away from the ways race exists and is reinforced beyond skin color.

Cinderella’s colorblindness attempts to obscure the visibility of a multiracial cast that, at the very least, could have been seen as one step toward representation. Interestingly enough, in Kendra James’s oral history, it’s Jason Alexander (who plays Lionel) who at least acknowledges the bizarre paradox of “colorblind and multiracial”: “I said, ‘Look I understand that we live in a world in this film where it doesn’t matter what color people are! But Cinderella was African-American! Do Lionel and the Prince really not know she was black? Couldn’t they eliminate half these women and save time?’”

I believed in fairy tales that had to ignore who I was in order to include me. 

Herein lies the tension behind the joke: “It doesn’t matter what color people are” actually diminishes the very Black princess they are supposed to be celebrating. It’s funny that the son of a Black queen and a white king is played by a Filipino man. But it should matter that Brandy is Black, particularly for the part of the story in which Cinderella literally needs to be identified. Being Black is part of her identity. She is Black and she is a princess; to quote Alexander, “that was the whole point.” How can creators applaud themselves for diversity without acknowledging what that diversity is?

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The metaphor of the clear glass slipper demonstrates the basic appeal of visibility: that these fairytale and mythical roles could be played by anyone. It’s notable that the fairy godmother’s song “Impossible” gives a color adjective for each “impossible” transformation: “a plain yellow pumpkin,” “four white mice,” and “four white horses.” Only Cinderella, the “plain country bumpkin,” does not have a color.

But in the end, the film never acknowledges that this time, it’s a Black foot inside the glass slipper. Race is only obliquely referred to as oppressive, something to escape. But as August Wilson declares in his speech “The Ground On Which I Stand,” the Blackness of Black people is beautiful in its specificity, not “an undesirable condition” or a burden that colorblindness benevolently relieves. In a lineup of women vying for the prince’s heart, not seeing color only blinds the story to the fullness of Brandy’s desirability as a specifically Black woman. How impactful would it have been if Cinderella’s stepsisters enviously observed how her dark skin glowed in the moonlight, instead of only nodding to race in loaded dialogue like, “You can wash your face, but underneath you’ll still be common”?

Whitney Houston opens the film singing the “Impossible” melody to tell the audience that “dreamers never make the dream come true”; the Cinderella story that follows is meant to prove those lyrics wrong, to make the impossible dream of a Black princess possible. But when creators pride themselves on their “blindness,” it inhibits their understanding of the Blackness they claim to want to represent. They cannot hope to represent something that they refuse to see.

That is what we lose when we accept, and even ask for, colorblind casting that tells Black actors to be visibly but unspeakably Black. Colorblindness isn’t just a fantasy that dreams of a world that ignores difference. It’s a pedagogy of assimilation that teaches audiences, particularly young audiences of color, how to dream themselves into erasure. I believed in fairy tales that had to ignore who I was in order to include me.

It was only once I decided to go natural that I could begin my metaphorical (and literal) detangling of the ways I had internalized colorblindness. I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to just start fresh with healthy curls because I had to first work through the damage of those dreams. Transitioning, awkward as it was—growing out half-curly, half-fried wavy hair was some kind of look—gave me time to unravel the fantasies of desirability that made me straighten my hair in the first place.

It wasn’t that I had grown up hating my Blackness; that would have required a real understanding of what it was I hated. Instead, the visible, unspeakable Blackness of the few Black characters I saw growing up had taught me that my own Blackness was something incidental. Returning to the movies and TV shows I loved so much made me reexamine fantasies of a world where my Black body “didn’t matter.” Colorblind casting silently establishes the premise that color is just set dressing, not a marker of different lived experiences. Back then, when Blackness wasn’t supposed to “mean” anything, I resented the reminders that my hair and skin did shape the way I moved in the world.

But when I cut off the last of my damaged hair, and all that was left when I looked in the mirror was an Afro that refused to be managed, it felt like seeing myself for the first time.

Understanding the failures of colorblindness doesn’t mean that I have to reject my love for Cinderella entirely. In an essay published by The Guardian, Toni Morrison offers the ways she tried to carve out a world “both culture specific and race-free.” It’s a careful, methodical explanation that acknowledges both that race is an unavoidably “impinging fact” for Black women and that it is not the only fact. Race does not have to be central, making a story so obsessed with depicting Black realities that it exploits Black pain. There are many amazing Black authors writing a variety of nuanced Black princesses and royals—like Roseanne Brown’s A Song of Wraiths and Ruin and Rena Barron’s Kingdom of Souls, to name just a couple—and my love for those stories can exist alongside my love for the flawed stories that first inspired me.

The big chop might have been quicker, but as long as colorblind casting continues, there are lessons yet to be learned in detangling the damage. Only once we can name colorblind fantasies for what they are and what they teach us to dream can we truly move beyond them toward Black girl futures.

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