My son, who is 4, and I were walking along the street today and saw a man with his left leg amputated beneath the knee. My son spun around and looked at him, then said to me, “That man lost his leg! What happened?”
I said I didn’t know exactly, but sometimes people lost arms or legs through accidents or didn’t have them for other reasons.
My son instantly said, “Gobber (from How to Train Your Dragon) lost his arm AND his leg and now he has to use tools in their places!”
I kind of collected my jaw and said, “That’s right, and that man is just like Gobber. There’s a special word we use for those kinds of tools. It’s ‘prosthetics’.”
“Prosthetics,” said my son, with satisfaction, and on we went without any further discussion about it.
But then we got on the bus, and there was a young black woman with her hair pulled back in a big floofy afro ponytail, and my son, who has seen the trailers for the new Annie movie, said, in delight, “She has hair like Annie’s!”
Representation matters.
Reblogging because, yes it does. And because this post is a great example of why representation matters not only to the people seeing themselves represented in movies books etc. but also for everyone else.
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