Hi and welcome to the Bridgetown Daily. My name is Kristen Newton. I'm one of the leaders of the racial justice committee.

Now we're going to have a little bit of fun with this daily because this past week it was announced that Disney plus was bringing Cinderella to its platform.

Now if you're not familiar with the Cinderella story, here's the 15 second version.

It's a story created in 1634 of a down on her luck fatherless girl saved from her wicked stepmother by a very godmother and a handsome prince.

And went on to become one of the brothers Grimm's best known works published in their 1812 fairy tale collection.

But the version that I'm talking about today wasn't just any Cinderella. No.

The Cinderella I'll be talking about came up two decades later in 1997. It was the Roger and Hammerstein version with singer Brandy as a princess and a wonderfully diverse cast.

Yes, this was the first ever black princess. I saw there was also a black queen with locks in her hair. The prince was Filipino American and blended families were centered on the screen.

There seems to be no borders and no questions about it being weird or out of place. It just was everything belonged there.

For me that that moved from being just a diverse cast to a more inclusive space. And as a child watching this, I soaked it all in.

I finally saw myself in a princess for the first time ever ever. And I would not shut up about it.

And I wasn't like loud about it. But I, but I soaked it in in quieter ways. I would braid my hair just like the Cinderella that I saw on screen.

And I would look out the window waiting for my fairy godmother that who ideally looked like Whitney Houston like on the movie to come tell me that everything and anything was possible.

I can remember so vividly recreating the scenes a thousand times in my own little corner of my room, painting around singing softly and looking longingly at the window at God knows what.

And I was like this was a moment of black history for me. And if you saw the response in social media when the news of the films re-release was announced a couple weeks ago or last week, you would probably see that it was a big deal for a whole lot of other people as well.

In fact, when it was released in 1997, it reached a whopping 23 million households, which is an estimated 60 million viewers and just one night. I feel like that should tell you something that this wonderfully diverse and inclusive setting attracted some people.

And we get it. Why is this girl going on and on about a movie that came out to decades ago? Well, one representation matters. It does. It really just does.

It can be easy to write this off like, oh, it's just a role in a film. Just one casting change that was made. But our society knows now more than ever that how much entertainment and what we can see can shape us. So yes, this was and is a big deal.

Three, I want to highlight that black history is not limited to just the inventors and people who said quotable things, while that's all great. And we should learn about those things. We should really study and learn about them. It's also about celebrating all of the black contributions to society, even the ones on screen.

Especially the ones that impact our children and how they see themselves in the world around them, like you did for me. And four, here's the kicker. We are called to inclusivity. Now you're probably like, okay, now she's going somewhere.

Let me define inclusivity for you. It is a practice or policy of including people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized. And this isn't just diversity, inclusion goes beyond diversity.

Terrence Lester says that diversity invites people to the table, but then inclusion empowers their voice to be heard while they're at the table.

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