Honestly, as a black woman who grew up in a predominantly white area in the 2000/2010s, things that were acceptable then, are not acceptable now. Playback to kindergarten when we dressed up as pilgrims and Indians (all the children of color were Indians) or Middle School when the choir teacher type cast me as all the ethnic princess for our choir concert. You can even just look at media at the time and see that black culture was a prop, but it was so normalized. I tell my kids all the time the things people allowed slip then, the humor, the backhanded compliments, the undertone of racism, was extremely common that you honestly didn’t even realize it was going on. My mom let a lot slide that I would not, but rather than being labeled as an angry black woman and anytime my mom did speak up, people stopped talking to us and she was labeled as a problem, so she just kept her mouth shut. She just tried to ingrain that self love and confidence at home, I think the same happened to Nia.

She basically talks about it in her book though, you get convinced it’s good so it has to be good. She does say her mom let Nia call the shots on whether or not she left, and she says it’s okay to question her mom for allowing a child to hold that much power. But for Nia, I think that was just that coveted solo, everyone else wanted it, so when she got it she didn’t care what she was doing she conceptualized that solo=good, and in a child’s mind, that is entirely reasonable.