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Woman Launches Campaign To Make Christmas Less ‘White’

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A woman launched a campaign to make Christmas more diverse after deciding the holiday was “too white.”

Nadya Powell, an advertising consultant, started the project after she searched for images of Christmas activities while working on a school project with her daughter’s friend, reports The Guardian.

Powell and Sara, a friend of her daughter, only came across white families posing in Christmas activities, Powell said. There apparently weren’t any black families that accurately represented Sara, she said.

That realization started Powell’s campaign to make Christmas less white.

“She was not seeing anything that looked like her and I realized she never did. This beautiful little girl is growing up in a world where on a daily basis she doesn’t see people like her in any media, where a perfect Christmas is a white Christmas,” Powell declared.

Powell connected with a modeling agency, Looks Like Me, when launching her campaign against the whiteness of Christmas. The project will inundate social media platforms with pictures of ethnic families doing random Christmas activities. The photos will be accompanied by the hashtag #ChristmasSoWhite.

Various media and marketing groups like Google, MediaCom, Saatchi & Saatchi and Edelman have financed the project.

Other people are trying to make Christmas more diverse. The Mall of America recently featured its first black Santa. During a four-day period, Larry Jefferson, a black man, dressed up as Santa and took photos with children. (RELATED: America’s Biggest Mall Gets Its First Black Santa)

“It gives them something to identity with, but Santa is still just Santa,” Jefferson said. “Just Saturday, I was doing an event, and one child said, ‘Santa, you’re brown,’ and I said, ‘Yes, I am, but Santa comes in many different colors.’ He said, ‘Oh,’ so I gave him a candy cane, he ran off with other kids.”

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