#BrownGirlMagic

For a long time I was afraid of telling people I was South Asian. To this day I still am a bit weary. I was happy to have the ability to hide who I was in my mixed kid light skin and ambiguous features. But only recently have I seen the impact that being honest about your identity can have. Of course it’s not always met without judgement or ignorance. But those aren’t the times that matter. It matters when you see a young girl that looks like you tell you her dreams and see you as someone to aspire to.

For the last four years, I’ve been so lucky to mentor young South Asian girls in my community as part of a project created by teacher and facilitator Ayesha Rashid called WOW. Women Offering Wisdom. The team at WOW have assembled an incredible panel of South Asian female mentors that span every discipline and walk of life. I’d always heard the term if you can see it you can be it. But never was that more evident then when I was standing in a room of biochemists, high powered lawyers, engineers, and women that I’d never even had exposure to because we don’t see these amazing women and what they are doing.

None of the young girls I spoke to even considered a career in the arts or media. That was never an option they thought was available for them. That’s a whole generation of young girls who thought their only options were law, medicine, or science. It was and is an eye opening indication of the effect of minimal diversity in the media. The girls literally had never seen themselves represented as successful images in the media. Not just from the images we see in ads, to the way people are represented on tv and in movies, but also they’d just never seen any creators of those images be a brown woman. They just understood that the people behind those images and media weren’t like them.

That’s why it’s so important we make diversity a priority. It’s important too that we don’t treat it as a token fad. It really does matter. It’s not about sprinkling in a person here or there that fits the bill when we cast a commercial. It’s about doing the work to make sure the experiences are broad, that the voices are being heard from more then a few walks of life. Truly great projects are great because they appeal to a wide range of truths. If we’re not doing that then we’re squandering the opportunity for something to be truly great. Taking the safe road doesn’t create good work. It creates irresponsible mediocrity that continues oppression.

When young girls see they have the option to be successful in media, they’ll go for it. The net becomes wider. The pool of talent becomes more diverse. That’s how change happens, that’s what I want to be a part of. But also I hope that’s something we all want to be a part of.