Role Model or "Other"? How Windows & Mirrors Are Vital to Today’s Society

Actress Kelly Marie Tran, wrote a beautiful piece in The New York Times this week as a means of responding to horrible harassment online after becoming the first woman of color to be cast in a leading role in the Star Wars franchise.

In the article, she discusses how she felt growing up feeling like “the other” and that the harassment online that forced her to delete her social media accounts this year brought those feelings back to the surface. What’s amazing to me is that there were young girls dressing up as her Star Wars character heading to the movies and at Comic-Cons because for many of them, this was a character they could relate to – a character that looked like them and yet Kelly still felt rejected by so many people who harassed her publicly. It’s feelings that don’t easily go away or ones that are resolved with a quick fix, but is a cultural mindset that needs to be changed more than anything else.

I’ve talked about the importance of windows and mirrors in literature and it’s just as important on the silver screen. With movies that are earning millions at the box office like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians. The world is demanding to see people of color on the screen, the publishing world is demanding to see diverse books and I hope that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m lucky that finding a character like me in the books I read is easy (because for so many it’s downright difficult to see yourself in books), but what I love more is learning about experiences that I may never have through the characters I meet in books. Those windows and mirrors are so vitally important, make sure that you take a look at your own bookshelf and check for both!