Parenting is a very hard job. But what makes it even harder is when people interfere with their opinions and try to make you look like a bad guy when you're just trying to make your child feel better.
A woman found herself in a situation where her coworker called her racist because she let her white autistic daughter identify with the Asian Disney princess. And so, she went to Reddit to ask who was the jerk in the situation.
More info: Reddit
A parent's job is to make their child feel as good in the world as possible. But what to do when your effort gets on some people's nerves?
Image credits: MOVIE PREDICTOR (not the actual photo)
A woman was called out for letting her daughter go around telling everyone that she's just like Mulan
Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Karolina Grabowska (not the actual photo)
Image credits: u/Sensitive-Ant-5907
She answered that she's not going to police her daughter's already challenging ability to communicate
The 8-year-old autistic girl’s favorite Disney princess has been Mulan ever since she was little. Mulan is a Disney animated musical action-adventure movie. It is based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan.
The plot takes place in imperial China. In it, Fa Mulan, daughter of an aged warrior, impersonates a man to take her father’s place during a general military draft to counter invasion.
And even though the OP’s daughter doesn’t live anywhere near imperial China, she still found quite a lot in common with the princess. Mulan “never knew what she was doing either” and since the girl always struggled with fitting in, she found that she's not the only one. Mulan's struggle provided her a sense of self-identification.
However, the complexity of Mulan’s character is not so clear to everyone. Some just see her as a representation of the Asian race, not much else. One day the OP took her daughter on a playdate with one of her coworkers and her child. When the subject of Disney princesses came up, the girl brought up how she was similar to Mulan. Her mother’s coworker gave her a funny look. And after the kids went off to play, she asked the mother why she let her white daughter say such offensive things.
The mother explained the context behind her daughter’s words, but the coworker still said she shouldn’t let her daughter say these things, because others might find it offensive. But the mother answered that she won’t be policing her young autistic daughter’s words because that could negatively affect her. She already struggles with communicating her feelings enough.
Image credits: Daria Obymaha (not the actual photo)
The autistic girl from the story is not the only one who thinks she and Mulan are alike. In fact, some theories are circling the internet, which state that Mulan might be autistic-coded.
Autistic-coded characters are those who are never explicitly said to be autistic in the source material, but people presume they are. Usually, it is presumed due to people seeing some traits in characters that can be found in real autistic people. Usually, such traits as difficulty in socializing, unusual thought processes, and sensory differences, to name a few, are interpreted as being autistic traits.
Some mention that defining these traits as autistic is quite a generalization and it should be noted that a person having any of these traits does not definitely mean they’re autistic.
Coming back to Mulan, some people listed traits that, according to them, prove that the princess might be autistic-coded. The list includes such traits as being socially awkward and clumsy, fidgeting with her hair, seeing herself as a misfit, and so on.
So, if we take Mulan as an autistic-coded character, the girl from the Reddit story identifying with her makes even more sense. And so, the mother’s coworker trying to make this situation bad by bringing race into it was just a jerk move.
People online were of the same opinion. A lot of them pointed out that the trouble was not a white girl identifying with a princess of a different skin color, but the coworker's white savior complex. She shouldn’t go around telling people who they can and cannot identify with. Mulan resonates with plenty of people no matter their skin color.
Folks online decided that resonating with Mulan is not a race-specific experience and the coworker should back off
