When You Wait Upon a Star…

It started with Phillis Wheatley. Then came Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni who ushered the way for Saul Williams who inspired all of the children of Hiphop and now, the poets of the 21st Century have a venue thanks to Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam and Brave New Voices.
Excuse me if I missed a few, but I wanted to get to this point as quickly as possible: when the revolution is televised, it is hard to ignore.
People who are calling this the resurgence of the Renaissance are not listening close enough. This poetry thing was big well before I started frequenting the U Street Corridor in 2000. It is now in high demand because people have decided they needed something with more substance, not that elementary rap on the radiowaves.
Youth Speaks is giving people their fill and slamming (the Present Continuous of the word poetry slam) since ’96. Though I no longer consider myself a poet – it is rare to see poets retire, so call it a promotion as I traded in my flowing stanza and couplets for feature stories and columns – I attended the 12th Annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Chicago July 14-19 hoping to be inspired.
Attempting to come up with a word to describe their poems would be foolish. 51 teams from performing arts capitol NYC to Oahu, HI, Guam, and everywhere in between expressed themselves on issues of: Thinking Outside of the Box (Leeds, UK), Homosexuality (NYC), Child Abuse (Ft Lauderdale, FL), 125th Being the Socioeconomic Mason Dixon Line Separating Heaven and Gentrification (NYC). They had so much anger, compassion and poignancy that an FCC censorship would be a Purple Heart for them.
In my opinion, the Ft. Lauderdale team deserved best poem award for Disney Princesses.

“When you wish upon a star (unless you're poor)
Makes no difference who you are (unless you're colored)
Anything your heart desires (if you’re one of those Super Sweet Sixteen girls)
Will come to you (as long as you’re white and blonde)”
I’ve been wishing upon a star ever since I was a little girl.
It seems that Jiminy Cricket got lost on his way to my windowsill.
Every little girl wants to be a princess growing up,
But it’s a little hard for me to play Disney when my mirror, mirror on the wall tells me that none of the princesses look like me.
I could never be the fairest in the land because fate wasn’t fair with my pigmentation: I was never fair enough.
For me the Bluest Eye wasn’t a book, it was a Snow White movie in my living room. While Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella had high collars and elegant up-dos, Princess Jasmine barely had a shirt and Esmeralda was a prostitute...So now I’m still standing here waiting for my prince charming come.
It’s like Pinocchio is a real little boy and three days just isn’t enough time for me to find true love’s first kiss, but it is enough time for me to call my lawyers.
I’M SUING DISNEY FOR FALSE ADVERTISING!
A little fire-breathing dragon knocking at my door, so tell prince charming to catch a cab because the only poison apple I've bit into is this clever marketing that’s blinded me with its fairy dust.
I think I’m wasting my reality kissing calls out of the rabbit hole. I’m done rubbing dusty lamps for wishes that won’t come true.

Ft. Lauderdale Team

Alas, for all those little bronze colored girls with hair the color of the sands on Punalu’u Beach, their wait is over. Disney’s Tiana, of The Princess and The Frog, is their first attempt at a black princess since opening their studios in the 1920s. I will be the first to give Disney the benefit of the doubt and say they were in no way pressured into making this cartoon to match the historical ramifications of the potential first president of color and his beautiful black queen everyone admired.
They probably spent those 80-plus years researching and developing this story to get it just right; not wanting to upset the Civil Rights watchdogs like Warner Brothers in 1968 with their cartoons aptly name The Censored 11.
They corrected a few lapses – her original name Maddy, which closely resembled Mammy, was switched to Tiana and her profession of chambermaid was changed to waitress/chef who aspires to be a restaurant entrepreneur – and have a film set for a December 11 release. Will Tiana follow suit and be considered one of Disney’s elite princesses alongside Snow White, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Cinderella, Ariel and Belle? Or will her doll remain on the bottom shelves with Jasmine, Milan and Pocahontas?
All that is left is for Disney to pen a black prince charming so these newly anointed black princesses can see what royalty really is and stop settling for basketball-jonesing, rap-career-aspiring, thug-wannabe paupers.