Misty Copelands glorreiche letzte Verbeugung

**From Dawn Porter, multi-Emmy Award-winning filmmaker:** 

When I was about 5 my mother and I would take the subway downtown for my Saturday ballet class. I loved everything about that day but was particularly proud of my pink tights and slippers. By putting them on, I became something no one else believed me to be: a princess. It never occurred to me that those tights were supposed to mimic skin tones. Why would that have occurred to 5-year-old me? My skin wasn’t pink.

When I was 7, we moved, and I switched to gymnastics. I could have asked for more ballet classes, but I think even then I’d gotten the message that ballet wasn’t for girls who looked like me.

Still, in 7th grade, when a friend and I discovered that anyone could sign up for lessons at the American Ballet Theatre, we took the express bus downtown and signed up for a class. The assistant looked pleadingly at the instructor the moment we entered, and the experience was mortifying. We didn’t know any of the exercises, we were too tall, too inexperienced. We somehow made it through that class and then back to the Bronx. We never tried it again.

Read more: [https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/misty-copeland-retires-american-ballet-theatre-rcna239695](https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/misty-copeland-retires-american-ballet-theatre-rcna239695)