The artist, Nadia Snopek, is White and likely did not consult a single Black person before publishing. In the originally mentioned conversation, Ku’ulani Keohokalole (She/Her/‘Oia), shared something I’ll never forget. She shared that “When people say they ‘don’t care if people are blue, purple, or green’, I tell them there are no blue, purple, or green people. People don’t come in those colors, so what are you really saying?”

When I first saw Moana, I cried and I was proud. After I was able to process the film for the moldy crumbs that it is, I was then able to see how ambiguous, exploitative and unfulfilling the film is. It’s beyond heart wrenching to know this is the amount of representation we’ll receive and that no other parts of our cultures will be emphasized because of greed.

And so colorism is something I feel I can speak directly to, because any anything can be a source of that for someone else, right? For some people, it's sizes, and for some people, it's ableism, transphobia, you know? So a lot of these social problems can have this a similar impact on other people, depending on their identity, and because of my particular identity and experiences, I feel like I can speak to colorism in a way that does create change, both for individual people but also in communities and cultures.