What watching Lizzie McGuire taught me about White America

Posted On Oct 7, 2019 By admin With Comments Off

What watching Lizzie McGuire learn me about White America

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My native tongue, <a href= Tagalog, is one of the most beautiful communications I’ve ever heard. The lingo is a melodic coalesce of ancient Tagalog, Malay, Spanish, and Chinese. It took me times to realize the abrupt sink of consonants at the end of words, the repetition of syllables used to shift between tenses, and the vowels that ground in your cheek like pork siopao–those subtleties of a postcolonial native tongue.

I wish I knew how to appreciate my language when I moved to the United Mood in 2003, just in time to start middle school. To mold my American accent, I remained glued to the television screen watching an all-American Disney Channel legend, Lizzie McGuire, drew by actress Hilary Duff. Growing up in Quezon City, I was afraid of being seized and sold into human trafficking while doing regular things, like forget dwelling to go shopping. I grew up in a country that positioned prohibits in the windows of clas buses so that pickpockets couldn’t steal our phones and purses while we sat in traffic. Meanwhile, Lizzie, Miranda, and Gordo accompanied confidently through the plaza with the singular thought of buying $110 rhinestoned blue jeans from The Style Shack so that Lizzie could win Best Dressed in the school yearbook.

My cousins and I joked about the new life waiting at the other end of a 26 -hour journey to our brand-new home–the Filipino meals I’d share with potential white boy admirers, the organizations I’d wear now that I didn’t have to wear a Catholic school uniform, and the promise of personal opening and privacy that exclusively exists in suburban youthful stories.

Change happened immediately. Weekends were filled with babysitting and hushed faith activities instead of what I was more access to: monstrous house meets overflowing with menu, playful cousins, and gossiping Titas. Puberty made my body unrecognizable, a happening complicated by my brand-new appreciation of possession over my private room and naturalnes to move with less danger. I felt somehow safer at home but more foreign in my own skin.

Through it all, the suburban world-wide according to Lizzie McGuire remained my haven. Each escapade started with a conflict that obliged Lizzie to choose between her American family-centric costs and opportunities to climb the social ladder. But the demo never presented any substantial roadblocks on the path to forming Lizzie’s identity. Lizzie McGuire was allowed to innocently rebel by wearing a black motorcycle jacket, flaunt her independent blotch who used to work behind the bar at the movie theatre( to earn added patronizing fund ), and, more importantly, proliferate her inner voice through the showy Cartoon Lizzie. All of her blunders were catalogued as innocent explorations; in my own actuality, I couldn’t even say the word reflect wrong.

Mrs. M, one of my middle school teachers, refused to call me by my name Bea( stressed bay-yuh ), insisting that the American pronunciation of my figure was Bee.

“When the authorities have two vowels strolling together, ” she said, quoting an arbitrary English diction rule, “the first one does the talking, and the second one does the walking.”

Every Friday, she earmarked an hour for her students to take turns reading aloud from the books we were introduced to in class. That hour frightened me. It felt deep flustering to see chiefs bob up at my dubious mispronunciations while I stuttered down clauses. As laughter swum through the breath, Mrs. M sat in silence, never chiding those who chuckled at me. Soon, I ditched familiar siopao-filled vowels for compressed, jaw-gritted ones. I opted for the less physically tightening American pronunciation of meeyr( mirror) over the mouthy Taglish version, mee-rohr. Even though I was an enthusiastic student at Lizzie McGuire’s School of the American English Accent, my ability and my tongue couldn’t work fast enough, leading to utter shame when my accent accidentally slipped out.

To say that this linguistic change is scarring gives too much credit to my oppressor, so I call it simply by its list: postcolonial trauma. After generations of Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Us occupation; after the brutality that rubbed Filipino tribal cultures in favor of gray skyscrapers in the metropolitan capital of Manila; after leaving the country we knew so well to make a better life for benefit of future generations in the West, my family–like most immigrant families–was not gave with the feelings implements to confront people who didn’t understand or care to learn about our culture. Meanwhile, white people, like Mrs. M, were taught to believe that white culture is superior through American institutions: education, news media, movie, television.

Walt Disney Pictures

“Luckily, ” I writes to myself in one of my old school Lisa Frank magazines, “I have Lizzie.” As I watched, I realized that Lizzie was raised on the fundamental idea that her conceptions, feelings, and name should always come first. In contrast, my multitude hometown–replete with strict religious hierarchy and impoverished homes improving stopgap homes on the two sides of roads–led my family to raise me with collective consciousness. My girlhood tasks are attached in collective upkeep, the signature Filipino “hospitality” that convenes on the border of service and martyrdom. Coming to America floors are differentiated by a shift in priorities. Collective consciousness drops in the shadow of validation afforded by ascending corporate and social ladders.

Lizzie facilitated me to navigate the American cavities I was lucky enough to enjoy without the threat of violence tower over my intelligence. But I couldn’t overlook the fact that grey Americans were allowed to explore their identities while Black, Indigenous, and other students of shade like myself moved on eggshells around them to protect their learned notion that whiteness is superior. The show itself accommodated a safe seat for me to witness a young girl fighting to do whatever it are necessary in order to triumph in life, but slowly built in my subconscious the idea that oppression works to support those who look like her, leaving color and brown girls to fend for themselves.

The McGuire family was too busy upholding the standards of white American success and social acceptance to ever consider their privilege. In the same vein, Clarissa: The Teenaged Witch, Phil of the Future, and Even Stevens focused on the everyday mini-adventures that fetched grey homes closer. Even when establishes and movies like That’s So Raven, Wizards of Waverly Place, and Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior explored Black, Mexican-Italian, and Asian American pedigree dynamics, the floors still pivoted around assimilation and proximity to whiteness with simply the sparest racial nuance.

When we still lived in the Philippines, my cousins and I wondered if Lalaine, the actress who played Miranda in the Lizzie McGuire streak, was Filipino. Years eventually, on a creepy Wikipedia detour, I would confirm that Lalaine is of Filipino descent. When I was younger, the idea that Miranda was Filipino and white-passing gave me hope that I’d one day assimilate so well that parties would forget I was foreign. Today, my American accent is so inherent that most of my friends are surprised to learn I didn’t growing quite in this country.

I realize now that this American freedom is granted to me because of my own proximity to whiteness, that my light-skinned features and carefully crafted American accent established it possible for me to feel safe around white people. Being adapted by white-hot video allowed me to not fully consider the ways in which people in other cultures continue to work towards promoting oppressed in America. Simply in my late teenages would I learn that dark-skinned South Asians and Middle Easterners were being unjustly targeted as a result of 9/11. Only in my early twenties would I learn how to empathize with Black people as I watched Black America stand in solidarity with the men and women being shot down by a militarized police force. Exclusively in my mid-twenties would I learn that the Brooklyn land I now occupy formerly belonged to the Canarsie tribe.

Light-skinned immigrants like myself are opened the freedom of the media to assimilate to whiteness, however do so at the peril of our neighbour Black and Indigenous societies.

I’m grateful to members who Lizzie McGuire for giving me an emotional framework to anchor the incredibly difficult transition of moving to a new country. I’m grateful for my ability to switch between Tagalog and English or Taglish to move their own families tales that my sisters and future daughters need to know. With a Lizzie McGuire reboot recently announced to fanfare, I hope that one day immigrant teenages might find more of themselves in shows that paint a picture of the American kinfolk experience.

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