A black 7-year-old sings as Snow White and a cruel audience laughs

When Melyssa Stone was seven years old, she was chosen to play Snow White in a Disney revue at school. She wore a beautiful handmade dress, knew the words to the song she was about to perform. And even though she was nervous, Stone was excited to get on stage.

But something happened when Stone played Snow White, something she was not expecting.

As she told her husband, Mark Stone, "that was one of my first 'aha' moments ... in understanding the difference between how I viewed myself and how I came to learn how the world would view me."

The Stones were interviewed in Seattle by the University of Washington Center for Communication, Difference and Equity. The interview is provided courtesy of StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity's stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world: www.storycorps.org.