3 From Bootstraps to Glass Slippers: Black Women’s Uplift in Disney’s Princess Canon

Since the early 1900s, Black people manifested the ways that consumption provided opportunities for equal respect in the United States. As a marker of their modern subjectivity, Black people worked to illustrate themselves as part of the American polity through consumption. Black women, in particular, became invested as producers and consumers in the sartorial aspects of consumption as a visual (and political) repudiation of narratives that construed their complexions, butts, lips, and hair as monstrous and undesirable.¹Close As an extension of the ways Black women cultural producers narrated the ability for Black women to participate in the production and consumption of US culture I explore the aesthetic and narrative representational choices for Black Cinderellas that these cultural producers made in two distinct yet interrelated cases: Disney/ABC’s made-for-television Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella (1997) and Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (2009). Reshaping quintessentially American fairytales that purport faith in individual progress through hard work and the ability to shift one’s economic and social circumstances overnight, I center the stories of Black Cinderellas—and the Black women who created them—as a late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century evolution of Black uplift narratives. These stories align Black people’s struggle for autonomy and economic independence with US princess narratives. I question how and why the Cinderella story lends itself to fantasies specific to Black women’s experiences as well as which visual choices Black women make as producers of these narratives to communicate Black women’s beauty and industriousness.

As I locate visual, narrative, and ideological connections between Black Cinderella stories as cultural products in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I also highlight the narrative choices that further instantiate the importance of Black people’s participation in the commodification of blackness in corporate environments. As in previous chapters, I explore the nexus of the connections between Black women’s cultural productions; corporate interests; US discourses on race and beauty; and the ideological relationship between Black women cultural producers and consumers through what I call embodied objectification—the process through which Black women infuse consumptive products with the histories, knowledges, and aesthetics that encapsulate their cultural heritage to hail consumers. I extend those discourses to include two films that Disney used specifically to build relationships with Black consumers. Created, funded, personified, and voiced by Black women, these popular princess films invite further questioning of how fantastical narrative imagination, blackness, coyly referenced (hetero)sexuality, and beauty standards in popular culture mold the images and ideas that Black girls connected with in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The relationship between visuality and the American Dream is imbedded in the emergence and narrative structure of Cinderella as Black. While the story of Cinderella has proliferated globally as a story about a poor (or even enslaved) girl who is unjustly persecuted after the death of her father and then “rewarded” with the love of and marriage to a king, the particularities of Cinderella in the Western world have bound Cinderella’s misfortune to her family and her reward to a handsome prince who notices her with the help of a fairy godmother. The story, regardless of its cultural location, presents the possibility for a massive shift in personal circumstance due to magical intervention.

A distinctly feminine struggle resulting in the end of unjust treatment and servile labor, the story of Cinderella—a girl whose own name bespeaks her color (ashen) and station in life—specifically maps onto US ideals of hard work leading to good fortune. Yet, the presentation of Cinderella as a Black woman in the US context conflates ideas of unjust persecution and misfortune with individual hard work, beauty, and magic. I argue that this shift in context and meaning is due to the relationship of Black people to modern subjectivity through histories of oppression. I examine Black women’s harnessing of Black symbolic power for Cinderella stories through the construction of Black US struggles for equality as “rags-to-riches” narratives and how they become part of the cultural products of Black women who want to illustrate themselves as beautiful as part and parcel of modern subjectivity through princess narratives. I consider how we might understand the purposeful inclusion of Black women in princess narratives as producers, actors, and consumers. Black women’s roles in the creation of Black Cinderellas redirected the narrative of rags-to-riches with the help of a handsome prince to the ability for Black women to act as their own change agents, creating their own opportunities for success and self-fulfillment.

Extending the relationship between Black producers and consumers I have explained in the last two chapters, here I contextualize Black women’s role in the tradition of Black Cinderellas as visual markers of their war on ideological narratives that present Black women as undesirable. The merging of Black striving narratives and the fairytale story of Cinderella illustrates a strong identification with and correlation between Black historical rags-to-riches narratives and the popularity of Cinderella’s story in the United States generally. Further, I trace how these Cinderella stories capitalize on both the symbolic power of Disney’s original Cinderella story as well as Black people’s attachments to modern subjectivity through Cinderella as a visual example of their shift from an oppressed past to modern, worthy-of-respect subjects. I conclude with a discussion of how these images both affirm and deconstruct traditional Cinderellas as only white and blonde. Together, the images of Black girl princesses I explore form a narrative that critiques and rewrites the ideological belief that whiteness is a prerequisite for royal status, especially at Disney. Alongside the not-so-fictional Black princess Megan Markle who spurned global awe and disdain in 2018, these stories say, “it’s possible” for a Black girl to be desired, to be a princess, and to be herself, while also navigating the historical stereotypes of Black women.

Popular culture in the United States has and continues to craft narrative imaginative spaces that privilege stories of underdogs overcoming seemingly insurmountable social obstacles and political or economic strife, the Horatio Alger myth. Early colonial Protestant preachers like John Winthrop saw the so-called new land of the Americas as the Jerusalem to which God was sending his people, establishing US attachments to the Protestant work ethic and faith-fueled prosperity. Sacvan Bercovitch points out that many historical documents were inflected with Protestant jeremiads in which the founding fathers “confine[d] the concept of revolution to American progress, American progress to God’s New Israel, and God’s New Israel to people of their own kind.”²Close American progress became synonymous with the success of wealthy Judeo-Christian Europeans who used indentured servitude, enslavement, and proximity to the status of church clergy to create the capitalist system on which the US contemporarily operates. The fantasy of the American Dream is built on the belief in a god or system that favors certain people, and that favor is illustrated through one’s ability to participate in consumptive practices to prove one’s citizenship. The spirit of America is therefore built on a cultural consensus about progress and the need to remain “one nation under God” to receive providential favor.³Close For this reason, the highly individualistic Judeo-Christian idea that steadfast faith in oneself can result in unparalleled accomplishments is recycled in everything from car commercials to films about sport and cultural heroes. Popular culture, and its pervasive recycling of faith-based capitalist values, acts as the main conduit for the narrative ideologies that privilege “underdogs” or hard-working individuals as the keys to collective progress. These ideologies transform the stories of individuals into stories that instill a greater symbolic civic faith in the downtrodden’s ability to rise despite active discrimination, systemic laws, and pervasive attitudes that secure their place at the bottom of the economic ladder. Specifically for Black people in the United States, the infusion of Judeo-Christian ideals of faith despite circumstance and hope for a better future while one toils—which Kate Bowler calls “prosperity gospel”—formed the basis for many cultural attitudes that infuse American cultural products.⁴Close

Ann Petry’s famous 1946 novel, The Street, provides an example of Black narrative imagination that captures the correlative faith in prosperity and therefore consumption. The novel follows the story of Lutie Johnson as she struggles to understand her place in society as a Black working-class, single mother. Lutie wholeheartedly subscribes to the belief “that anybody could be rich if he wanted to and worked hard enough and figured it out carefully enough.”⁵Close Throughout the novel, however, Lutie is confronted with racialized, gendered, and classed discrimination that hinders her ability to achieve the American Dream and is consistently reminded of the ways that she will never measure up to others who are doing well. Lutie’s narrative arc reiterates the ways that Black people, especially Black women, cannot always be prosperous in American capitalist structures of success. The attachment to this idea, however, is built on its prevalence within many of the narrative ideologies of the United States.

The ways that people in the United States approach Black history, too, illustrate the belief in Black people’s seemingly superhuman ability to accomplish modernity, success, and freedom despite societal barriers; even Black superheroes—like Storm and Black Lightning—are imagined as everyday Black people whose “Otherness” is based on harnessing powers from a genetic mutation, rather than some alien origin.⁶Close Blackness alone becomes a superlative quality that can hurtle Black people past centuries of constant and dehumanizing oppression, securing their place as full—meaning economically favored—citizens within the American polity. Alongside white supremacist violence that actively stalks Black lived experiences, Koritha Mitchell calls this propulsion to create, strive, and achieve “a deep sense of success and belonging,” Black folk’s “homemade citizenship.”⁷Close

For Black people, these narratives manifest the connections between the historical demonization and enslavement of Black bodies and any individual’s struggle with racism, sexism, and economic poverty. The establishment of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, for example, at the end of the presidency of Barack Obama was spun as a culmination of the struggle for recognition and acceptance for Black people rather than the result of many Black people’s decades-long organizing, fundraising, and petitioning to create the museum.⁸Close The narrative arc of the Blacksonian, as it is sometimes colloquially called, too follows a superlative rags-to-riches construction in which the election of Barack Obama was the goalpost for the inclusion of Black people in the US cultural landscape.

Yet the cultural beliefs that undergird the museum and its narrative arc follow in the footsteps of the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century ideological uplift oratory and economic habits of Black intellectuals. Nannie Helen Burroughs, for example, explained that one of the most important things that “the Negro must do” in the early 1900s was buy a home.⁹Close She believed that the foundational pieces of life—like buying a home—would make Black people acceptable in society and create financial stability. As a way to minimize racism and discrimination, as Burroughs, Anna Julia Cooper, and others argued, Black people must illustrate their ability to participate fully in the intellectual and economic work of the United States, and show their participation in society through their ability to consume.¹⁰Close Davarian Baldwin explains that at the turn of the twentieth century, many Black people saw freedom enacted through the ability to consume and produce in the marketplace, a partial embrace of liberalism to assert themselves as citizens: “the overt desire for autonomous black cultural production through economic control, and specifically through consumer strategies, was arguably the most salient aspect of Chicago’s New Negro consciousness” because Black people saw that a “symbiotic relationship” between consumers and producers was needed to truly be free.¹¹Close The symbiotic relationship between Black producers and consumers was directly tied to the development of a modern Black consciousness in which both individuals and collectives could make themselves citizens through the ability to create and consume products—especially those created with Black people in mind.

As more Black people moved to larger cities, seeking economic advancement through business ownership and civic society membership, the belief that a “modern” Black subjectivity required some adherence to capitalism spread. Through a faith that consumption could and would make Black people respectable to the white American public, Black people became active in capitalist endeavors. In short, consumption could make Black people fully human (even while their dehumanization was the basis of modern, global capitalism). This relationship to consumption was particularly important because of Black people’s (newly acquired) ownership of their bodies, labor, and property. The right to consume in the United States is seemingly protected under the law and therefore constituted Black people as citizens who had to be protected. Jasmine Cobb explains how even enslaved Black people used pictures to visually connect themselves with citizenship and therefore making themselves modern, protected individuals; Black people were “not just creating distance between freedom and slavery’s meditation of Blackness … they were reimagining and reconstructing Black visuality” through “staged intelligence and literacy.”¹²Close Black people staged daguerreotype images to construct themselves as modern and therefore capitalist subjects.

For Black women, in particular, their recognition as women occurred through the growing relationship between consumption, ownership, and respectability. As modern subjects, Black women were able to claim not only their right to consume, but also their right to control their bodies as protected and as beautiful.¹³Close For example, both Katherine Williams Irvin, editor of the Half-Century Magazine, and Sunday Chicago Bee’s editor Olive Diggs created the intellectual space for Black women’s interests and political insights to exist on the front page of the Black press. As proprietors of New Negro womanhood through the curation of Black women’s opinions and concerns in their respective publications, Williams Irvin and Diggs articulated a “respectable” Black womanhood as a counterbalance to “Mammy” and “Jezebel” stereotypes.¹⁴Close Their work within the Black newspaper and magazine industry overlapped culturally and ideologically with the haircare products Black women entrepreneurs like Annie Turnbo Malone and Madame C. J. Walker created as well as the speeches, pamphlets, poems, and books Black women like Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Zora Neale Hurston, and others wrote to illustrate Black women’s ability to create and consume as modern subjects. Black women in multiple industries and over the course of the twentieth century labored to illustrate their own industriousness as well as Black people’s collective potential to achieve the American Dream. Citizenship, modernity, and blackness were built together around Black uplift through the production of themselves and consumption of various goods and services. Black people used visuality as a means to illustrate their ability to produce and consume, a key element of progress within the US capitalist structure. In the latter part of the twentieth century, with new opportunities to produce and therefore control nationally (and at times globally) circulated images of Black women, Black women cultural producers turned to projecting Black uplift in more fantastical ways.

There have been many iterations of Black Cinderella narratives (e.g., the picture book Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters and Broadway Cinderella plays with Black actresses), but my research focuses on the aesthetic and narrative representation of Black Cinderellas in two cases: the made-for-television Disney/ABC special Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella (1997) and Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (2009). Principally, I focus on these versions because of their popularity since they were released and the controversy surrounding the films’ ability to represent and imagine Black girls as princesses. Additionally, Disney’s purchase of ABC in 1995 produced a televisual empire that allowed the corporation to connect television, film, theme parks, and merchandise to their princess pantheon.¹⁵Close Disney’s empire has been built on strategic fantasy-making, which typically reiterates specific racial, cultural, and gendered performances. Since popular culture is already constituted by fantasy and desire, much like narratives of the American Dream, Disney’s particular narratives of race and gender push popular culture to extremes.¹⁶Close Disney obscures societal and cultural specificities for the so-called love of imagination, like Mattel, whose empire is also built on fantasy-making for children and the nostalgia of parents. Whereas Mattel argues that the company’s products provide a platform (in Barbie play) for children to imagine themselves, Disney proscribes imagination, through its films, network television shows, and subsequent material objects. Disney imagines possibilities for children, rather than allowing them to craft narratives of their own. Those possibilities, as D. Soyini Madison reminds us, are always white, rich, and heterosexual, within which Disney princesses function as romantic upward mobility success stories.¹⁷Close

The difference between material product and visual product—dolls that Black girls can assemble and disassemble as they wish versus images that Disney uses to imagine narratives for girls—is important to distinguish. Because of Mattel’s hesitancy to prescribe a life for Barbie—whether Black or otherwise characterized—children and adults participate in queering Barbie’s presentation, narrating her experiences and life through the very act of play.¹⁸Close This shifting authorship of Barbie’s narrative illuminates the ways that Barbie as a material product differs from Disney’s Cinderella as a visual one. Peggy Orenstein and Karen Wohlwend agree that Disney’s princess narratives communicate particular messages about identity that perhaps are not as present in material objects.¹⁹Close Moreover, Disney’s hypercapitalist enterprise for selling princess narratives, through the extreme merchandizing of princess paraphernalia “blurs the line between play and reality, allowing children to live in-character.”²⁰Close Children can live an entirely Cinderella-themed lifestyle through the consumption of Disney’s bedsheets, Tupperware, lunchboxes (full of princess cereal and fruit snacks), princess apparel (tiara included), bookbags, costume jewelry, makeup, and fuzzy slippers. Orenstein finds that around age seven, children learn that material objects determine their gender identity; therefore, Disney (and Mattel’s) encroachment into even earlier moments of childhood—through the infantilizing of teenage princesses into young girls in films and play—tries to secure strict consumer allegiance from very early on.²¹Close Both companies have embedded themselves in US constructions of childhood so much so that there are few other possibilities. For this reason, Disney is the exemplar in the relationship between Black producers and consumers, particularly in the command of children’s imaginations in a capitalist structure.

Disney is in the business of harnessing the symbolic power of its films to create lifelong consumers on multiple platforms; similar to Mattel’s Black Barbie endeavors that have impacted Black girls across generations, Disney’s Black Cinderellas have become a feature of Black girlhood over the past thirty years. These iterations—1997 and 2009—ultimately illustrate that Black women can do more than wish on a star to change their lives; they can choose their destinies and make it happen on their own with hard work. Unlike the traditional Cinderella fairytale, which frames a prince as the resolution of Cinderella’s conflict with her stepfamily, these versions display Black women taking initiative and, in many ways, creating their own destinies (with a good-looking non-Black/American man as the icing on top). In these iterations, Black women defy the lazy stereotypes and insurmountable odds that permeate US popular culture by being recognized as hardworking, beautiful, and therefore, marriageable. However, Black Cinderellas continue to reify “rags-to-riches” ideologies through their struggle and a bit of “good” magic (read: luck) that drastically changes their circumstances within a few days.

Although the historical beliefs about blackness compete with ideas that a Black woman could be a princess (or a fairy godmother), these Black Cinderellas shift the imaginative space available for Black women and girls. As fantastical tales, these Black Cinderella productions envision Black women as beautiful and worthy of any suitor, which in many ways disrupts “scientific evidence” of Black women’s inability to find a mate that has proliferated in US discourse since Daniel Moynihan’s report on the Black community in 1955. Tamara Winfrey Harris describes the so-called crisis of Black relationships precipitated by Moynihan that feeds current statistics—the US Census in 2010 reported that 46 percent of Black women were unmarried as if the success of Black marriages rests solely on Black women’s shoulders.²²Close As Black women cultural producers enact these narratives to protest the lack of representation of Black women and girls visually, they also defy statistics and cultural attitudes that continually put Black women at the bottom of the hierarchies of desire.

Black women cultural producers position Black women in these fairytales as resistant agents, visually scripting the affirmation of Black cultural and idiomatic traditions while also confirming the importance of princess uplift narratives. Their work, too, affirms the importance of US white heteronormative fantasies of success, in which a girl’s fantastical future must include a man to confirm her beauty and importance. In this way, Black women cultural producers affirm Black allegiances to US capitalism and the strivings in which Black people have participated to be included as modern subjects.

Disney’s network relationship with ABC (and with Mattel) materializes the ways that visual culture creates and maintains consumers through fantastical worlds. Disney’s Wonderful World of Disney—which released the Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical version of Cinderella—recouped much of Disney’s film magic for primetime television; originally slated for CBS but homeless after shifts in leadership there, Cinderella was seen by then-chairman of Disney, Michael Eisner, as the best way to relaunch the Wonderful World of Disney brand.²³Close In the late 1980s and early 1990s, specifically for Black consumers, Disney and Mattel made the “multicultural turn” to “identity politics” despite national backlash. Discussing British multicultural propaganda to obscure cultural racism, Rajeev Balasubramanyam explains, “a multicultural society refers to a society with black or brown people in it”; therefore, “multiculturalism refers to propaganda that tell us that … a multicultural society, is not racist, or rather that the state and corporations are not-racist and so the society is moving in this direction.”²⁴Close “Multiculturalism” is then a post-1980s dogwhistle for Black and Brown assimilation, a necessary marketing method to lure new consumers and benefit from the great economic potential of nonwhite communities in the United States (and find new markets or laborers in other global markets).

Five years after Kitty Black Perkins developed and released Mattel’s Shani dolls with their own Afrocentric welcome party, Disney/ABC debuted their made-for-television Cinderella (1997). This fairytale premiered during primetime on Sunday, November 2, 1997, with Robert Iscove as director.²⁵Close This film reflected a multicultural shift in television programming and expanded ideas of compatibility across racial and ethnic barriers, garnering 60 million viewers and seven Emmy nominations. As the only Black woman on a team of producers, Debra Martin Chase controlled the multicultural agenda within the production of the television film for the Wonderful World of Disney, an important launching of the sub-brand that would specifically garner new consumers through television. Whitney Houston, who starred as Fairy Godmother, and Martin Chase had worked together previously on The Preacher’s Wife (1996), a film from Houston’s production company, Brown House Productions. After the success of Cinderella (1997), they continued to produce girl-led or “niche” films like The Princess Diaries, The Princess Diaries 2, and Sparkle together. Martin Chase had a longstanding deal with Disney to produce these and other films that capitalized on teenage girls as the main actresses.²⁶Close Newly popular starlet Brandy Norwood starred as Cinderella, while Whoopi Goldberg was cast as Queen Constantina. This adaptation highlights a multicultural cast, yet Black women are prominent; Fairy Godmother, mother of the prince, Cinderella, and stepsister Minerva were all recognizable Black women, especially in Black cultural productions: Houston had an amazing career as a singer and had started acting; Goldberg saw stardom with the Sister Act franchise, highlighting her acting and singing; Brandy’s show Moesha and budding musical career after a successful first album made her a valuable choice for Cinderella; Natalie Desselle also had a budding acting career in popular Black films Set It Off, B*A*P*S, and How to Be a Player. Executive producer Martin Chase explains that she hoped this Cinderella “reinforces the art of dreaming—having a vision and understand[ing] that everyone has the power within to make that vision come true.”²⁷Close In her statement, Martin Chase shifts the “Disneyfication” of blackness to reinforce the “art of dreaming” that Disney perpetuates in all of its films and multicultural inclusion.²⁸Close She and Whitney Houston also visually constructed Cinderella as distinctly Black through Black vernacular idioms, multitextured clothing patterns, and interracial couples, and memorably the Whitney Houston and Brandy Norwood song “Impossible” that headlines the film.

In interviews for the twentieth anniversary of the film’s release, the writers, actors, and production team remember the energy with which each person understood the film. Originally, Houston was supposed to be Cinderella, capitalizing on her popularity in music and acting at the time. Martin Chase and Houston were distinctly invested in crafting a multicultural narrative of Cinderella with a Black lead whose robust personality would carry the film, and Disney executives believed Houston transcended any issues they might have by casting a Black woman as Cinderella: “because Whitney was so huge at that time; to a lot of executives she was popular entertainment as opposed to being defined by her race.”²⁹Close This erasure of Black identity and cultural upbringing is typical for many Black performers who experience mainstream fandom. In US cultural and political spaces, the tensions between blackness and multiculturalism—the ideology that bespeaks inclusion while obscuring anti-Black attitudes and behaviors—become palpable when someone like Houston, whose performances and aesthetics are rooted in a Black Christian experience, reaches stardom in which her particularities are erased in favor of a multicultural inclusiveness and therefore universalism that can be identified with whiteness and by white people. In the twenty-first century, this rhetorical replacement of blackness with multiculturalism has shifted to postracial discourse wherein race is not notable and therefore representable (and where the mere mention of race is considered racist and un-American). Janell Hobson argues that racialized and gendered meanings become attached to bodies, rather than specific racial groups, as evidence of racial progress, thereby inviting so-called Others “to dismiss their own lived experiences of sexism, racism, classism, and imperialism in exchange for the mediated vision of ‘progress’ advanced in social and political representations.”³⁰Close Multiculturalism, and postraciality or colorblindness, especially in Hollywood, encourage diversity as simply phenotypic disparities based in ocular recognitions of difference rather than robust and strategic understandings of race, ethnicity, and identity formation.³¹Close

In this vein, Martin Chase and others made sure to balance the diverse representation of the cast, struggling to make sure this Cinderella kept its multicultural flair. Norwood was hand-picked by Houston, who felt she had aged out of playing Cinderella, while the rest of the cast was built around these two Black women actresses and the voices they would bring to the musical. Martin Chase recounts the importance of Black women specifically in front of and behind the camera when she says, “I got into this business to change images and break down stereotypes. When I grew up I never saw myself on screen.”³²Close Her comment not only undergirds the specific work of blackness in the made-for-television film, but also reinforces the ideological relationship between production and consumption that was important in the making of the film; and, as evidenced by the joyous social media celebrations when Disney announced the film would be added to its streaming platform in February 2021, Cinderellacontinues to connect to Black girls and women because the film majorly shifts the narrative to match ideological beliefs to which many adhere.

A conversation between Cinderella and the Prince reinforces that this Cinderella will be different than previous princess narratives: after the Prince suggests that he would like to get to know Cinderella—“What would a man have to do to find himself in your good graces?”—she challenges his confidence and questions his knowledge of how a girl should be treated. The Prince says, “Like a princess, I suppose,” while Cinderella responds: “No, like a person—with kindness and respect.” The Prince responds, “You’re not like most girls, are you?” highlighting how this narrative (and this Cinderella) is differentiated from other princess and even Cinderella narratives. This Cinderella is “not like most girls,” so audiences should expect a change in the narrative plot. Beyond typical romantic cliché, this character’s desire to be treated “like a person—with kindness and respect” is more related to the lives of Black women than princess narratives because royalty is always understood as distinct and superior to common people; this Cinderella establishes a desire for consideration rather than possession. While Rebecca Wanzo suggests recognizing “the pitfalls inherent in doing black versions of generic narratives. Escaping from black history is challenging for the knowledgeable reader, and if the reader is not knowledgeable, that can produce even more disturbing results,” I contend that the construction of respect and dignity of personhood in Cinderella is salient because of Black history.³³Close It is distinctly because of Black history that Cinderella’s seemingly cavalier statement resonates within Black strivings narratives of uplift despite the multicultural façade of the film. Both Black women and princesses were inherently objects to be owned and used as props garnering upward mobility and status for others. This Cinderella’s distinction implies a lean toward gender equality since we know that men treat other men of a similar or higher caliber with kindness and respect. As the poor girl who amuses herself among the cinders, the daughter without a father, the Black girl mistreated and overlooked, she is perceived to be “not like most girls” as are many Black women and girls in the United States, and yet her only desire is to be treated “like a person.” This desire for recognition of her humanity not only bespeaks cultural undertones of Black striving narratives and respectability, but also foreshadows how other Black Cinderellas I will mention later situate themselves within princess narratives.

Although this Cinderella does display typical plot formations (such as an evil stepmother, a prince who wants to find a wife, and a fairy godmother), it is distinctly Black. Its blackness is intrinsically connected to the fact that visually, Black women characters (Cinderella, Fairy Godmother, and Queen Constantina) propel the narrative forward. They ultimately become aligned in a trifecta of fantasy in the castle by the end of the film with Norwood and Goldberg becoming “family” and Houston hovering over the whole scene. These three women shape the narrative, punctuated by the song “Impossible,” which features sonic connections to Black communities’ desire for change and prosperity. These aspects of the film are not accidental, especially since Disney’s 1950 animated Cinderella as well as Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1957 and 1965 television film versions of the musical (all based on Charles Perrault’s story) have no people of color at all; Black women in this film as producers and actresses shape how the narrative reflects and develops Black possibilities for change through Black cultural traditions of music and desire for beating impossible odds, rather than further substantiating Black women’s historical positions as servants and wise-cracking wet nurses.

While the plot progression and characters are salient to the film’s “magic,” the song “Impossible,” twenty seconds into the feature, is the conduit through which the entire film and, more importantly, the project of multiculturalism Disney attempts to establish with Cinderella occurs when Whitney Houston (and indeed it is Houston rather than the Fairy Godmother since we do not yet know anything about the film) is superimposed on a deep indigo background in a confetto of gold, green, and red. Slowly punctuating each word, Houston sings, “Impossible, for a plain yellow pumpkin to become a golden carriage/Impossible, for a plain country bumpkin and a prince to join in marriage.” Speaking plainly, she continues, “a slipper made of glass is just a shoe and dreamers never make the dream come true. Impossible.” She disappears in a flurry similar to the one with which she entered and the words “THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY and WHITNEY HOUSTON present” replace her. This positioning of Houston and the song in the film, before the production team, actors’ names, and brand are announced, is not coincidental; the so-called multiculturalism of the film is built upon harnessing Houston’s own mainstream recognition and success, while also signaling to Black (women) consumers. In cultural and entertainment spaces, multiculturalism as a concept stands in for codifying Black expressive traditions, Black people, and Black sartorial practices for white viewing audiences, therefore narrowing Black representational opportunities to ones that are recognizable to white people, while also hailing Black consumers who will know, identify with, and celebrate these opportunities as Black symbolic power.

After meeting Cinderella at home, the song continues with the Fairy Godmother singing to Cinderella and us, “But the world is full of zanies and fools/who don’t believe in sensible rules,/and won’t believe what sensible people say./And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes/Impossible things are happening every day!” These lines of the song bespeak her lesson to Cinderella about how to go from dreaming to action. The lyrics illustrate a collective dissonance between dreamers and doers that ultimately frames the resolution between Cinderella and the Prince as well as the dissolution of Cinderella’s family unit. As a dreamer, Cinderella’s desires are directly in conflict with her treatment and social status, but she returns to them as a “daft and dewy-eyed dope.” The song reminds her, as well as the audience, that impossible things are happening every day, but not by themselves; we must do rather than waiting on things to happen.

Because the song “Impossible” is about deconstructing what is conceived as impossible and making it happen with what is already available, Black women’s roles in this Cinderella are imperative. For example, Whitney Houston is the first sight on screen, making the Fairy Godmother a central role in the fictional tale. Her introduction features Black vocal traditions and aesthetics; her popularity at the time (and forevermore) resonates even without having any context for who she is in the film. Later, she also invokes Black idioms and expressions with verbal inflections like “honey,” eye and neck rolls, and facial expressions. She tells Cinderella, “If you want to get out, you have to do it yourself, honey,” which mirrors the discounting of hopes and dreams in the song and reflects similar cultural lessons that Black people, especially Black women, spread in their communities. When she introduces herself to Cinderella (and the audience), the Fairy Godmother says: “I’m your fairy godmother, honey,” “you got a problem with that? ’Cause if you’d rather have some old [read: white] lady in a tutu sprinkling fairy dust in here… .” Her inflection and her mention of another type of fairy godmother again reminds the audience that this is not the typical Cinderella story; Houston is not the dowdy old “bibbidi bobbidi boo” white woman familiar from Disney’s previous Cinderella stories. The Fairy Godmother is not here to just sprinkle magic dust and give Cinderella what she wants. In fact, Fairy Godmother’s power comes from her fingers—from her inner essence—rather than a magic wand; when asked how she “did” that after making a fire and closing the door without moving, she says “practice” rather than with magic or a spell. In this way, the Fairy Godmother does not just change Cinderella’s situation with magic, but inspires in her an ideological shift—one that heralds the importance of going beyond wishing and believing to create change. Her song “Impossible” pushes the idea that Cinderella should go do something—so much so that Cinderella preaches the same idea to the Prince, causing him to defy his parents and search for his beloved on his own after losing her at the ball. Whitney Houston as both producer and Fairy Godmother positions herself as a formidable force in the ways that Cinderella’s narrative develops, aligning her own ideological (and Christian faith-based) position in life with the underlying lessons of the film.

After being questioned by the Queen and King about her family and stature, Cinderella escapes to the garden for a brief conversation with her Fairy Godmother. Bristling from the questions, Cinderella requests to go home. Fairy Godmother says, “Oh, so you’re just giving up?,” pushing Cinderella not to abandon the plan that she desperately wanted. Cinderella replies, “I’m not what they think I am” and the Fairy Godmother reminds her “All they’re thinking is that you’re the most beautiful girl at the ball, and you are.” The Prince finds her in the garden and admits he wasn’t interested in attending the ball either: “Don’t you think it’s a little medieval, everyone circling around as if I were some prized bull they were trying to rope in?” Both the Fairy Godmother’s reassurances and the Prince’s mentioning of the “medieval” pageantry of the ball remind the audience and Cinderella that this is not a typical Cinderella film. In medieval times, none of the characters the audience has grown to adore would be present. Similarly, if family and societal stature mattered, Cinderella would have no chance beyond hopes and dreams. However, the “magic” of this story is built within the project of multiculturalism—we are reminded that the true magic of this narrative is in the diversity of people as well as in the ideological shift from believing in the Disney-perpetuated importance of magic and dreams to the Black striving narrative structure of dreams backed up with action. Additionally, the Fairy Godmother’s challenge to Cinderella’s desire to leave the ball echoes the lessons young Black girls learn about facing difficulty. By staying faithful to the process, one learns, “impossible things are happening every day.” The Prince launches his kingdom-wide search for her and successfully replaces her slipper with her lost glass shoe, and Cinderella sings, “It’s possible, for a plain yellow pumpkin to become a golden carriage/It’s possible, for a plain country bumpkin and a prince to join in marriage.” Together, Cinderella/Godmother sing: “It’s possible!”

Much like the coalition of Black women that helped Mattel develop the Shani dolls in 1990, Whitney Houston and Debra Martin Chase actively shaped the ways that Cinderella was cast and therefore aestheticized. Both women had worked on successful films prior to this production and understood the ways that blackness could be inflected to entice audiences of color, while also maintaining the traditional Cinderella storyline that white audiences love. Because this production did not receive the Afrocentric introduction to the world that the Shani dolls did six years earlier, Cinderella even more so represents the multiculturalism that corporations like Disney, Mattel, and even Coca-Cola and McDonald’s sought to use to inspire loyalty from ethnic audiences to their brands. Culturally, the inclusion of Black and Latino populations in television shows and movies mirrored their rise in representation in commercials and advertising; more Black and Latino artists producing more complex melodies for jingles on television and radio represented this change, too. Like the way Mattel used its relationship with Shindana and Kitty Black Perkins to expand its brand, Disney learned through this production that Black women understood the aesthetic choices necessary to broaden Disney’s princess fanbase in Black communities. To have a successful production and a successful launch of the larger Wonderful World of Disney sub-brand, Disney learned it had to employ Black women and appreciate their cultural traditions as instructive in Black women’s work.

However, consumers were keenly aware of the film’s shift toward diversity, and its difference from past Disney or Cinderella films. Both the royal family and Cinderella’s stepfamily were strangely inclusive. A running joke still, more than twenty years after the film’s premiere, is how a Black woman (Whoopi Goldberg as Queen Constantina) and a white man (Victor Garber as King Maximillian) could produce an Asian prince (Paolo Montalban), or how a white mother (Bernadette Peters as Stepmother) could have both a white and a Black daughter (Veanne Cox and Natalie Desselle); Jason Alexander recalls that “blind casting” came to a hilarious moment in the film when his character Lionel is “trying the slippers on all the girls in the kingdom. Cinderella was clearly African-American—that was the whole point—but … in the long run, it didn’t matter. That’s how we knew the world really worked. Because by the time the audience got to that point in the movie, they weren’t asking those questions.”³⁴Close

Kristen Warner argues that this “quantifiable diversity” vacates how roles are written “racially neutral e.g. white” rather than creating “culturally specific roles for people of color,” yet the popularity of this casting process continues today with television’s most beloved shows, such as Shonda Rhimes’s Grey’s Anatomy.³⁵Close While described as colorblind casting, however, Cinderella seemed to cast with particular actors in mind. Because Whitney Houston had been specifically chosen as the centerpiece and showrunner for the film, all the other writers and producers worked specifically to create a diverse group of characters. This color-specific casting was illustrated even in the background characters, who displayed their own multiethnic community that somehow made the plausibility of the narrative dissolve into the film. Perhaps the work of Disney’s magic or the culpability of 1990s audiences, Black girl consumers coming of age when the film was released recall their love of the film because it showcased “a girl like me” as beautiful, desirable, and the center of the narrative.

Black actress Keke Palmer was cast as Cinderella for the 2014 Broadway adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella and she notes, “the reason I am able to do this is definitely because Brandy did it on TV,” recognizing the imaginative possibilities the 1997 film created within the viewing public.³⁶Close Palmer also proclaimed a globalizing narrative that connects to the overall theme of the 1997 film, but also to the larger Black striving narrative underwritten by Martin Chase and Houston in the film: “In me doing this, it shows everybody that everything is possible.”³⁷Close Palmer’s comments reflect both the underlying ideological relationship that Black women cultural producers and consumers have as well as the ways that relationship is extracted within global capitalist markets for “everybody.” The false promise of colorblind casting actually only provides opportunities for certain actors, like Palmer, to take on a role like Norwood before her. Between the 1997 Cinderella cast, especially Brandy Norwood as Cinderella, and Keke Palmer as a consumer (she was four when the film was released), the idea of Black women’s place in these narratives—as the featured character rather than as an extra—was solidified. The Fairy Godmother’s lessons to Cinderella—dreaming and wishing alone will not change your circumstances; within you is the power to do anything you want to do—resonated with ideas Black women had heard and Black girls had been told. As an “interpretive community,” a community in which collective meaning and importance are shaped, Black women and girls as producers and consumers recognized and identified with the lesson that wishing was not enough to change one’s circumstance; they learned to save themselves because of their own positionality and how histories of racism and sexism dictate Black women and girls must do more than wish to accomplish anything.³⁸Close

Although the film ends traditionally with the Prince marrying Cinderella, he actually finds her as she is hitting the road alone. Rather than waiting to be rescued by her white knight, Cinderella has already decided to leave because she “deserved to be loved.” Cinderella’s interaction with the Fairy Godmother, then, was not for an evening or one dance with the Prince. Reminiscent of one of Houston’s greatest hits, “The Greatest Love of All,” Fairy Godmother’s insistence that Cinderella “find the music within” and go beyond simply wishing and dreaming to change her circumstance became the basis for a transformation of her character and her outlook on life. Fairy Godmother underscores the necessity of escaping a bad circumstance even when it goes against promises made to others such as recently deceased loved ones because “this can’t be what [your father] had in mind.” Cinderella’s realization and subsequent exit from her stepmother’s house codifies a lesson to Black girls and women like her: a person, even a Black female one, is worthy of love and dignity, and should leave if that love is not felt. This lesson is one that can be extrapolated to all audiences watching the film, a directive that makes the girl power moment of the 1990s palpable; Fairy Godmother parrots the idea that one must set one’s own terms.

While the film is heralded as the “first interracial television production” of Cinderella that is “colorblind,” and shows “a normal mix of people,” the multicultural mission of the film is grounded in the performances of “blackness” throughout.³⁹Close Disney’s 1997 Cinderella is created and shaped by the representation of Black women from popular Black shows and films in every important narrative role as well as the use of Black idioms and cultural vernacular; song choices, jewel-toned aesthetics, and background instruments; and lessons known and recognized by Black women and girls. Cinderella’s braided hair, beautiful gown, and fairytale ending showed Black girls coming of age in 1997 that nothing is impossible—impossible things are happening every day!

Twelve years after Brandy Norwood embodied the Cinderella fairytale on television, Disney’s “first black princess” emerged in movie theaters. Set in Jazz Age New Orleans, Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (2009) was said to be the first Black princess added to Disney’s princess pantheon; inspired by novelist E. D. Baker’s The Frog Princess—an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm’s The Frog Prince—The Princess and the Frog follows the story of Tiana, a hard-working Black woman who is intent on starting her own restaurant, and her eventual relationship with and marriage to the fun-loving and philandering Prince of Maldonia, Naveen. While Naveen’s fictitious kingdom is only a cruise away from New Orleans, Tiana’s life and experiences form the basis of the conflict throughout the film; her major lesson hinges on her “fairy godmother” Mama Odie’s song to “dig a little deeper” to find out who she is beyond hard work, which will unlock her purpose and peace.

Anika Noni Rose voices Princess Tiana, a Black woman who becomes a princess through marrying a prince-turned-frog. The child of a hard-working serviceman father (Terence Howard) and seamstress mother (Oprah Winfrey), Tiana was taught that hard work and believing in her dreams could get her the things she wanted. In an early scene of her as a child, she tells her father about a fairytale book owned by her white friend Charlotte, and the importance of the evening star in that narrative: “Charlotte’s fairytale book said if you make a wish on an evening star, it’s sure to come true.” Her father replies, “You wish and dream with all your little heart. But you remember, Tiana, that that old star can only take you part of the way. You gotta help it along with some hard work of your own and, then, you can do anything you set your mind to. Just promise your daddy one thing: that you’ll never ever lose sight of what’s really important.” Mirroring the Fairy Godmother’s words to Cinderella, Tiana’s father tells her that traditional fairytale narratives are not enough for a Black girl child like her; hard work is as integral to success as wishing and dreaming. Tiana’s paternal lesson too mimics much of the American Dream that circulates in US popular culture: lots of hard work and faith in goals, coupled with luck, can give you everything your heart desires if you are Black.

After her father dies while serving in the military, Tiana’s dreams of owning a restaurant become her sole focus; to honor her father’s legacy and love of cooking for others, Tiana subscribes to the American Dream as experienced by many Black people—constantly working to save more. Despite working multiple waitressing jobs, however, Tiana is seemingly turned away from her dream at every corner—her Black friends and employers critique her self-sacrificing spirit; her mother bemoans her lack of grandchildren and reminds Tiana of her biological clock; and her best friend Charlotte, the daughter of a wealthy white sugar baron, is so preoccupied with marrying a prince herself that Tiana is left to her own devices most of the film. Tiana is characterized as industrious and hard-working like her father, yet completely self-sacrificing so that she may have her own restaurant called “Tiana’s Place.”

Although Tiana, unlike the fairytale Cinderella, has a loving family, her story is ultimately a Cinderella story through the ways that Disney depicts the landscape and geography, her fashion aesthetic, her relationship to Charlotte, and the resolution of her narrative. Conceptualized with the idea of a Black princess in mind, and knowingly constructing all of the characters with attention to Black cultural traditions, culinary knowledge, histories, and music, The Princess and the Frog presents the first Black princess within the Disney pantheon. Unlike rekindling a traditional Cinderella story around the casting of a Black singer/actress like Whitney Houston, the Disney production team started with blackness at the center of how this princess would be introduced to the world. However, the film starts with introducing two Black women’s voices, disembodied to illustrate a fairytale beginning: Anika Noni Rose’s voice welcomes the audience to the magical land as she sings: “The evening star is shining bright/so make a wish and hold on tight/there’s magic in the air tonight/and anything can happen.” The audience is beckoned into a towerlike window where pink curtains alert you to whom you might be meeting. Oprah Winfrey’s voice begins recounting a story, where a frog is begging a princess for a kiss to undo a wicked witch’s spell. While Anika Noni Rose’s voice may not be distinctive to many audiences, Oprah Winfrey’s voice—even reading a children’s story—is immediately recognizable. The combination of geography, Tiana’s fashions, her relationships with white people, and the distinct racial differences throughout the film bespeaks a palpable tension between Disney magic and Black cultural traditions. These two voices and the first few scenes not only construct the sing-song and wish-driven narrative that is reminiscent of Disney’s popular animated princess stories, but also attempt to lure Black girl and women consumers’ attention, much like the precredit use of Whitney Houston’s voice in Cinderella.

Set in New Orleans between 1910 and 1940, The Princess and the Frog was released just four years after Hurricane Katrina exposed the racial and economic disparities undergirding the fun-loving and harmonious cultural imagination that surrounds the geographic location. In many ways, Disney’s remapping of New Orleans serves to reassert the importance of its Mardi Gras culture (accentuated by the promotion of beignets, gumbo, and masquerade in the film) over the images of catastrophe and deprivation the media used to describe the hurricane’s aftermath; after Katrina, many of the businesses and cultural outlets, too, in New Orleans underwrote media campaigns to reshape the national imagination of its landscape and its racial problems. The use of the bayou, likewise, highlights the geographic blackness of the film—especially where “backwoods” white men catch escaped-people-turned-frogs and a house deep in the woods serves as refuge from the hunters.⁴⁰Close

Disney writers were careful to obscure racial dynamics in a fantastical pre-Katrina New Orleans by overlaying images that display socioeconomic status with ideas of thrift and magic, further illustrating their “imagineering” of social and economic realities. Disney’s imagineering of New Orleans as the setting for a twenty-first-century Black princess—the first in its princess pantheon based in the United States—is consistent with the physical and cultural gentrification of predominantly Black areas and cities that wish to harness blackness as “cool,” while divorcing the political, social, and spatial elision of Black people from the space.⁴¹Close For example, as Tiana and her mother travel from her employer’s neighborhood, the images of white families with mansions, pedicured lawns, and poodles is passed over in a dreamlike state until Tiana arrives home. As if under a spell too, Tiana leaves the plush pink bedroom of a wealthy white girl on a streetcar to the Black side of town where families like hers have small shotgun houses, no sidewalks or lawns, and little to eat, but share everything they have with others around them. The shift from mansions to shotgun houses is unremarked upon, as if the magic that occurs later is not specifically tied to the physical space of the mansion as a white space. The opening scene illustrates this dichotomy and foreshadows Tiana’s “funny” and unfortunate frog transformation later on: Tiana’s mother, Eudora, is a seamstress for a wealthy white family whose daughter, Charlotte, loves fairytales and Cinderella stories; all of her dresses are pink and all of her storybook characters are white. While Charlotte is dressed as a duchess (or perhaps a dunce) with a puffy pink dress and matching cone-shaped headdress, Tiana wears a green sheath dress with a small crown foreshadowing her becoming a frog-turned-princess (rather than princess-turned-frog) while Charlotte only has the trappings of royalty with dresses and grand furniture.

A conversation between the girls foreshadows their future fates as well: disgusted by the storybook princess’s agreement to kiss the frog, Tiana says with all the vocal intonation and head and body movements of a young Black girl, “There is no way in this whole wide world, I would ever ever ever, I mean never, kiss a frog. Yuck!” Charlotte replies, “Is that so?” as she dresses up her feline companion in a knitted frog costume and shoves him toward “Tia.” She says, “I would do it. I would kiss a frog. I would kiss a hundred frogs if I could marry a prince and be a princess.” Throughout the film, Charlotte’s obsession with marrying a prince is positioned as outlandish and juvenile.⁴²Close Her dunce cap then represents a faux-feminist commentary that her desire is foolish and she should instead be more like Tiana, who is disgusted by the idea of kissing a frog prince. The girlhood scene also reinforces the gendered racial dichotomies that present Black women as hyperindependent and focused on economic independence rather than love like their white women peers. And yet the racialized dynamics of their friendship align Tiana’s status and value in relationship to Charlotte’s; as Kimberly R. Moffitt argues, their friendship presents the ideology that “Black women’s bodies exist only when placed in contrast to whiteness, or specifically White female bodies.”⁴³Close

Later, at the Mardi Gras masquerade ball, when Tiana and Charlotte have grown up, Charlotte wears an enormous pink ball gown to win the affections of Prince Naveen while Tiana is in a yellow and brown serf outfit, serving white ball attendees her “man-catching” beignets. After she is told by the Fenner Bros. realtors that a “little woman of your background … [is] better off where ya at” even after they have taken her initial down payment for the restaurant location, her dreams are crushed (and her dress splashed with food). Charlotte elps her upstairs to change into a blue dress and a crown much like Brandy’s brown-rags-to-blue-gown transformation in Cinderella (1997). Charlotte reminisces after seeing Tiana’s outfit change, placing a crown atop her head: “Seems like only yesterday we were both little girls dreaming our fairytale dreams, and tonight they’re finally coming true.” This statement not only shows how different Charlotte and Tiana are experiencing the evening—Charlotte is waltzing with Prince Naveen while Tiana’s dreams are destroyed (and money stolen, since it is unclear if her deposit was returned). But it also glosses over the larger difficulty that Tiana experiences every day trying to fund her restaurant dreams while Charlotte merely needs to “wish harder” for hers. Charlotte’s wistful statement illuminates the irony that Cinderella was in a blue dress as an aesthetic marker of reaching her dream, while Tiana is in blue at the expense of hers.

Some critics have noted that originally Disney had purported to name their first Black princess “Maddy” with the occupation of a chambermaid; however, consultation with Black mothers at the behest of Oprah Winfrey (voicing Tiana’s mother in the film) made the narrative changes that became integral to the film’s plot.⁴⁴Close Enlisting Oprah Winfrey as a cultural consultant to host focus groups with Black mothers not only illustrates Disney’s understanding of the relationship between Black cultural producers like Winfrey and Black women consumers, but also how Black women (like Oprah Winfrey as Eudora, Jenifer Lewis as Mama Odie, and Anika Noni Rose as Tiana) constitute another trifecta of cultural producers (like the trio in Cinderella) that make The Princess and the Frog a “Black” production, despite the directors and writers being white men. Like the aesthetic choices that Black women at Mattel instituted to make their Barbie dolls more aesthetically pleasing to Black women audiences, as well as Debra Martin Chase and Whitney Houston’s decisions to make the Fairy Godmother’s hair curly and Cinderella’s hair into long braids, Disney’s developers drew Tiana’s childhood hair curly (she has afro puffs) and her skin distinctly browner than previous princesses. Tiana also uses facial expressions and vernacular idioms that differentiate her from other princesses, yet connect her to Whitney Houston in Cinderella and Black cultural traditions. As the voice-actor, Anika Noni Rose’s own personhood became the basis for Tiana’s facial expressions, attitude, and even left-handedness; the animators consulted heavily with Rose to make the first Black princess feel genuine to Black women and Black girl viewers, including the kind of details, intonation, and ideological values that Black women and girls would recognize as like their own.⁴⁵Close With the exception of one white friend—made through her mother’s employment, which echoes the role that enslaved and free Black girls played as playmates for white children while their mothers handled the house—Tiana is situated in a Black enclave that privileges the sights, sounds, religious undertones, and foods of Black culture.

Tiana’s restaurant, additionally, plays into historical connections of Black bodies and waterways without commentary. Her desired restaurant location is an old sugar mill with water access and she falls in love with Prince Naveen then later marries him in the bayou. Unlike traditional Cinderella versions, which position marriage to a prince as a way out of hard labor, Tiana’s vision still centers on work—which Kimberly R. Moffitt and Heather E. Harris show solidifies the ideological connection between Black women and girl audience spectators and the characterization Tiana embodies.⁴⁶Close Even in her dreams, she is working—although she is dressed in all white as if she is married to her restaurant. And, although she serves a multicultural crowd, all of her staff are Black (similar to how the only Black attendees at Charlotte’s ball were the musicians and Tiana, all of whom were working). While she is able to envision her life changing to include her dream, she (through Disney’s writers) is unable to see a world where racial hierarchies of power, capitalism, and privilege change.

Unlike Cinderella, whose perspective is changed almost immediately after meeting her Fairy Godmother, Tiana seems stuck in her struggle to open a restaurant regardless of how often her friends, mother, or “godmother” beg her to consider other ways of being. While her mother asks for grandkids, Tiana restates her dismissal of other ambitions; she starts her song “Almost There” by speaking, “Mama, I don’t have time for dancing,” then singing, “That’s just gonna have to wait a while/ain’t got time for messing around/and it’s not my style.” She notes how the geography and “good times roll” sentiment of New Orleans “can slow you down/people taking the easy way,” but she reminds her mother (and us) in the chorus, that she’s “almost there/people down here think I’m crazy but I don’t care.” In the faith-based Black striving narrative fashion, her song speaks of her father’s passing and holding down two jobs to save for her restaurant as “trials and tribulations” and his advice to her to wish, but work hard since “fairy tales can come true/you gotta make ^’em happen/it all depends on you.” Despite her mother’s reminder that her father had everything he needed in the love of his family, Tiana’s view is that her father’s unfulfilled dreams can eventually come true only through her own success in an old sugar mill turned stylish restaurant. The impossibility of Tiana’s vision, and demise of the confident security she has in her own industriousness, is underscored when the door closes after her final “almost there” declaration; the banister that once held her jacket and hat falls in a cloud of old sugar dust. Her dream will not happen the way she envisions.

Like Cinderella, Tiana has a “Fairy Godmother” in the form of Mama Odie who will save her from her mucus-coated state as a frog. The main antagonist, Dr. Facilier or Shadowman (Keith David), represents dark (yes, Black) magic, while Mama Odie represents the good that can be done with magic. Like Fairy Godmother Whitney Houston, though, Mama Odie forces Tiana and her frog prince to recognize the power that they have in their own right. In some ways, the narrative is supposed to be about Tiana reaching her dreams, but the different inflections of magic or uses of “black magic” take center stage. The Shadowman’s magic is based on desire, greed, fear, and obscuring the truth with “Friends on the Other Side” represented by dark creatures, while the song “Dig a Little Deeper” characterizes Mama Odie’s magic—an enhancement of what you already have on the inside and a call to Black/African spiritual traditions that harness the power of one’s ancestors to buttress their access to and demonstrations of respectability.⁴⁷Close Beyond the figurative struggle between darkness and light (and its likeness to every fight, biblical or otherwise) within the narrative, the film culminates in a battle between Shadowman and Mama Odie’s bayou representative, a lightning bug named Ray, who uses his brightly lit rear to kill Shadowman’s friends; like Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Ray is able to harness magical abilities through his inner essence rather than a spell. According to Mama Odie, your own “magic” can help you “find out who you really are” and “what you need.” Your own magic steers you to what you need and is like sunshine, which refracts the darkness created by centering desire and greed. Mirroring the lessons Cinderella learns in 1997 from her Fairy Godmother, Tiana is taught to think deeply about who she is and what she deserves; Tiana, though, is a bit more stubborn when it comes to shifting her focus and life philosophies.

This poignant struggle throughout the film emphasizes the tensions between Disney magic (i.e., wishing on a star) and the Shadowman’s mystical magic; centering desire, in contrast to hard work and determination, always ends badly in The Princess and the Frog. For example, when Tiana indulges in dreaming like Charlotte by wishing on an evening star on Charlotte’s bedroom balcony, she becomes a frog. By wearing Charlotte’s clothes and wishing while on her balcony—connoting to me a succumbing to white wealthy epistemologies, after losing hope in her own ingenuity and focus based in Black cultural traditions and knowledge—Tiana finally surrenders to Charlotte’s fairytale dreaming and is seemingly punished for it. After wishing on the “evening star” to help her accomplish her dream, she doubles down on Charlotte’s fairytale lifestyle by kissing a frog (whom we learn is Naveen). Rather than turning him into a prince as in The Frog Prince story, Tiana turns into a frog. Tiana’s shift from realistic to magical dreaming illustrates that indulging in magic—based in desire like that displayed in the Shadowman’s “voodoo emporium”—results in getting further away from her dream and herself. Once Tiana abandons her self-assuredness in her own ingenuity, every character she meets (Frog Prince Naveen and the trumpet-playing gator, Louis—another gesture to Black cultural traditions and the jazz great Louis Armstrong) is also motivated by dreams, things they wished for but resigned themselves to not getting.

Eventually, Tiana must embrace her froggy form (punctuated by her shouted remark, “it’s not slime, it’s mucus”) to return to her former self. The wedding in the bayou with creatures as witnesses maintains the use of animals from traditional stories like Snow White and Cinderella—furthering Disney’s inclusion of Tiana in the princess pantheon—while the second wedding in New Orleans as humans again shows Tiana dressed identically to the dress she wore in her vision earlier in the film. Visually, this wedding replaces her previous vision’s marriage to her restaurant. The color green marks her new life—the merging of frog knowledge and her experiences as a young Black woman into money, access, and respectability—after becoming a princess. Like her previous vision, she and Prince Naveen continue to work because, as she notes in the last line of the film, mirroring her stance in “Almost There,” “dreams do come true in New Orleans.” This narrative reinscribes the American Dream narrative for Black people: if they only work hard enough, they can achieve their dreams too.

However, the advice for Black women is double-edged; they must work hard to achieve their dreams, seemingly forsaking all other ambitions or desires and not waiting for a wish to do the work, but Black women must also be fun. Frog Prince Naveen tells Tiana while walking to Mama Odie’s home, “You know, waitress, I have finally figured out what’s wrong with you … you do not know how to have fun.” Called a “killjoy” and “stick-in-the-mud,” after working two jobs her whole life, Tiana is not just aesthetically based on Black women. Her experience, while glossed over in typical Disneyfication fashion, is fueled by Black women’s embodied objectification; the success stories of Anika Noni Rose, Oprah Winfrey, and Jenifer Lewis (as well as other popular narratives describing Black women’s labor and desirability) are embedded in Tiana’s struggle and her triumph. As exemplified by Tiana’s journey, Black women are taught to trust the same system that makes it difficult for us to be successful (and desirable) in the first place. Yet, we should do it with a smile.

Both Cinderella (1997) and The Princess and the Frog (2009) are narratives that position Black women as hyperproductive and therefore deserving of their good fortune; as the American Dream dictates, Cinderella and Tiana worked diligently and were therefore rewarded for their steadfast faith. Both women, too, are sedulous in their particular situations because of their dead fathers’ wishes: Cinderella’s father asked that she stay with her abusive stepmother because he wanted them to be a family, while Tiana’s father reminded her to match her dreams with hard work but not forget about the importance of family. (Fairy God)Mothers in both cases remind these Black girls to dream big and find love that reflects their dreams. The salience of these films rests not only in seeing princesses depicted as women steeped in Black cultural and vernacular traditions, providing a shift in the US cultural imagination of princess narratives—especially those constructed by Disney—but also, in how they represent some descriptive resolution to Black girls without fathers, even while recognizing the ways that fathers’ attitudes and behaviors may still impact them. Because Black women voiced and embodied these princesses, and Black cultural traditions were employed in the musical, geographic, and narrative arcs of both narratives, the reoccurrence of hyperproductivity in these Black princesses’ experiences is not just coincidental. The construction of Black women as industrious maintains the characterization that the US cultural imagination recognizes and is comfortable with based on histories of Black women’s labor and narratives about “strong Black women.”⁴⁸Close Insightfully, these characterizations also communicate the ways that some Black women, the persons who grafted their experiences with labor and love to provide the details of the films, wish to present themselves, their lives and experiences, to the consuming public.

The fact that Black women participated and engaged as producers, actors, and character models to shape these narratives that maintain characterizations of Black women as both beautiful and industrious elucidates the ways that Black women appreciate and even highlight the “strong Black woman” stereotype. Debra Martin Chase, Whitney Houston, Whoopi Goldberg, Brandy Norwood, Anika Noni Rose, Oprah Winfrey, and Jenifer Lewis are some of the most influential Black women in Hollywood and therefore are some of the most influential Black women to serve as models for how US (and even global) consumers understand the Black girls and women they encounter in daily life. As singers, comedians, and producers—women in the business of entertainment—these women and the roles they portray frame much of the US understanding of the lived experiences of Black women because of audience belief in mimesis as reality. Mimesis—or the imitation of real life in cultural products—shapes the ways that representations of Black people in popular culture are always believed to be real. In this way, these narratives problematically become hyperconstitutive of Black women as highly productive, industrious people whereas the narratives of beauty, self-determination, and the love of blackness are downplayed. These narratives, too, tell Black girls and women whom they should wish to become, reinforcing conceptualizations of blackness as tied directly to what labor can produce in a capitalist structure and that will still ask where is your joy, as you work constantly.

Despite the dependence of Black women cultural producers on these particular characterizations of Black women (based in the history of Black striving narratives and acceptance of the American Dream) in films made for children’s consumption, Cinderella and The Princess and the Frog present possibilities for Black women and girls to see themselves outside of the norm of Hollywood representation while capitulating to narratives that bind our blackness and desirability to our labor and attractiveness to men. In addition to showing other audiences ways that they can connect with Black people and their experiences, both films highlight and celebrate Black cultural traditions and knowledges with which Black girls and women connect. At The Princess and the Frog’s DVD premiere in 2010, actress Audra McDonald and her nine-year-old daughter Zoe Madeline Donovan gushed about being able to share the special moment together and relating to Mama Odie’s advice to Tiana, much like Keke Palmer heralded Brandy’s performance in Cinderella. McDonald too noted that her experience with her daughter was accented by seeing a large group of Black women in their forties, fifties, and sixties attending the film together.⁴⁹Close Illustrated by this intergenerational connection and exchange, Black women are hailed by the ideological work of Black women cultural producers, connecting their life experiences with the ones reified on Disney’s big screen. The ideological bridge Black women cultural producers build between themselves and Black girl and women consumers even through the façade of multiculturalism in consumer markets not only produces the conditions where Black princesses reshape Disney’s own claims of diversity, but also those in which Black women and girls become the consumers of their own narratives. In this way, Disney’s glass slippers and wishes erase the systemic mistreatment and dehumanization of Black women like Cinderella and Tiana in favor of highlighting the dream-filled honoring of industriousness and Black cultural aesthetics.

Cinderella stories are important to the construction and propagation of the American Dream because of the ways that US popular culture uses them to socialize people into the Protestant belief that steadfast work results in overcoming odds. Traditionally, Cinderella’s value only becomes apparent when the Prince chooses her as his wife, whereas the examples throughout this chapter illustrate how the inclusion of Black women in Cinderella narratives changes the story. Rather than simply casting Black characters in fairytale princess narratives, Black women cultural producers crafted alternatives by becoming agents of their own cultural narratives; they used their experiences and knowledge of Black symbolic power to provide so-called authentic lessons to all consumers. Under the umbrella of Disney films, Debra Martin Chase and Whitney Houston, specifically, produced new ways to narrate an “underdog” story for Black girls. Although Black women cultural producers sought to provide encouragement to Black girls via Cinderella and Tiana to dream big and chase their dreams, they maintained the importance of a heterosexual relationship via a prince as the answer for Cinderella’s woes and Tiana’s hyperfocus.

Alongside the rise of multiculturalism as a marker of the commodification of race in popular culture, Cinderella (1997) and The Princess and the Frog (2009) illustrate how Black women as cultural producers shape the imaginative space available for Black girls within popular princess narratives as well as the ideological relationships that Black women and girls have to each other. Dorothy Hurley explains that children learn “cultural information about themselves, others, and the relative status of group membership” through the images they are exposed to in cultural texts like television shows and children’s books.⁵⁰Close For Black girls and women, viewing lessons and singing songs under the auspices of Disney’s multicultural mission related to their own experiences both undergird and expand the imaginative possibilities within which they learn about themselves. How those lessons and songs are then utilized by non-Black consumers and viewers, then, is the basis of the next chapter.