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As a POC, especially as a "mixed" person, I used to believe that black people, especially black women, could never portray anyone important on TV and film... unless they were slaves. It didn't help also, that my small town school was very racist and every year in Black History Month, they would force us to watch graphic videos of black people being hosed down and bitten by dogs. We even saw images of black people swinging from trees.


I never knew ANYTHING good that black people have done... I only knew a little bit about Dr. Martin Luther King. But we never learned about anyone else. I didn't know who Harriet Tubman was until I got into high school. I didn't know anything about Dido Elizabeth Belle, who was a real person and the first black aristocrat in England and was a vital part of abolishing slave trades in England.

I was always so ashamed of my ethnic background because as a kid, we only saw all the bad things that happened to black people. Even as an elementary school kid, we watched videos of black people being attacked and each time we watched videos, all the kids would turn and look at me as if I were there or something.