Fairy tales that feed prejudice

Komal Randhawa

The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller, said Steve Jobs. How true. 

Once upon a time, there was a generation of discriminators created by the mere folly of storytellers, who didn’t make an effort to update the age-old traditional stories. We are all storytellers, born with the talent. Storytelling is an art as old as time and antecedes writing. Through stories, we try to keep alive an era gone by and pass on cultural roots. But it’s tribulation and glee, hand in hand. The biggest victims of this art form are children. Their clean slates are smeared with fables and stories that have been passed down from centuries and which have hardly any relevance today. A majority of these stories are actually a reflection of society’s prejudices that have cut through time and borders to make a permanent abode in our psyche. 

We have grown up hearing and watching stories of varied types of princesses in distress. My daughter utterly disliked the antagonist Maleficent in Snow White. Asked why? Her answer was simple, but hit me like a sledgehammer. I have unintentionally created a reflection of a psyche that I despise. She disliked Maleficent merely because she had a darker complexion and wore even darker clothes. These innocent audacities might appear harmless, but may create problems. Despite explaining to her that the character’s actions were merely a projection of personal issues, it fell on deaf ears. The damage was done. Everything boiled down to appearance. I had broken the scales of justice against people blessed with dark skin. 

Pick up any such popular story. The protagonist is fair, charming and bare of even a thread of malice. The antagonist is dark, with some peculiar feature like a big mole, crooked nose, obese or scrawny. We have ourselves learnt and made sure the next generation, too, associates dark skin colour with ‘danger’. We are trained from childhood to be wary of people with dark skin tones. These stories have failed to leave any room for doubt that the concept of good and bad are capricious and have no association with the skin tone of an individual.

US scholar Jonathan Gottschall says that we are addicted to the story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up, telling itself stories. 

Why still read stories of people obediently following the whims and fancies of a king? Why a damsel needs to be rescued by a knight in a shining armour? Why can’t we show the reality that life will keep throwing a curved ball and ‘happily after’ is just the beginning? It is said a story is as good as the storyteller. We need to evolve and use this beautiful medium to plug the gaps. And maybe everyone will live happily ever after.