In Remembrance of The Prince of Egypt from a Black Millennial

I was raised a Christian. I don’t mean the ubiquitous I-went-to-church-on-Easter Christian or my-family-casually-believes-in-God Christian; I was raised in an earnest, read-your-Bible-pray-every-day home that valued Christian education, worshipped every evening and weekend, and catered their children’s media consumption to follow the fruits of the Spirit. “By beholding you become changed,” I was taught, and so I couldn’t celebrate Halloween, was forbidden from watching shows deemed satanic, and was rarely allowed in movie theaters. As a young kid who, like most kids, wanted to be cool, it could be pretty isolating sometimes. I snuck and watched everything I could – which was a lot – yet full-length movies were more difficult to hide than most TV shows, and much of what was approved for my brother and me was woefully unentertaining by comparison to what I wanted. Until my mom took me to see The Prince of Egypt.

A rare trip to the movie theater, I expected what we often knew to expect from “Christian entertainment”: blatant moral themes from long-memorized Bible stories with substandard Hanna Barbara animation. What I got instead with a movie in 1998 that I needed, that we all deserved, and that still is – surprisingly enough – an anomaly amongst representations of North Africa and the Middle East. The Prince of Egypt was ahead of its time, so much so that the time of regular dark-skinned Bible characters and non-white depictions of Egypt is still yet to come. We were given Mo…