Antiracist Accountability: When "Pandering" Gets Nautical: The New Little Mermaid

Greetings again,

Here's hoping I can fit one more quick post in before the end of the month!

You may have heard that Disney is releasing a new, live action version of its 1989 film "The Little Mermaid".  If you have heard this news, you have very likely heard that the lead role of Ariel will be performed by Halle Bailey, who is a Black actor.  And if you've heard that news, you've probably heard about how some people lost their damn minds--not in a good way--over this development.

Unfortunately there has already been occasion in this blog to write about how problematic and entitled it is for white people to freak out about Black and other PoC people existing in media, and unfortunately this is not the only movie or tv show about which this has happened in very recent memory.  But there are some additional nuances to this particular petty racist tantrum that bear stating out loud.

First, unlike with "Black Panther" where the original source material centered an explicitly Black protagonist, the original "Little Mermaid" movie and its source material did not.  While this fact may seem to lend legitimacy to white viewers crying foul at Ariel being recast, it actually doesn't matter one bit.  Characters can be reimagined, and there is nothing intrinsically white to the character of Ariel, so changing this aspect of her character is fair game.  We're not even going to get into the excruciatingly obvious fact that MERMAIDS ARE NOT REAL AND THEY CAN THEREFORE BE ANY RACE WE WANT.

Second, to people crying foul because they are attached to Ariel as an arguably rare instance of representation for red-haired people (can you hear my eyes rolling from there?), congratulations!  Disney is not erasing the 1989 version of this movie.  If it means that much to someone to see their hair color (and whiteness--because we're not even going to get into the excruciatingly obvious fact that PEOPLE OTHER THAN WHITE PEOPLE CAN AND DO HAVE RED HAIR) represented in film form, they can watch and rewatch that version to their little heart's content.

Relatedly, third, those people claiming, perhaps sincerely, to feeling inspired or empowered by their representation in the form of the animated Ariel are engaging in a kind of callous emotional greediness and selfishness that I sincerely cannot fathom.  The argument is essentially: seeing myself in this character was deeply meaningful and uplifting for me, so I refuse to share that with anyone else who might benefit from seeing themselves in this character.  

Hearing it this way, I don't know how to interpret that argument as anything other than extremely and voraciously self-centered to the point of being both incredibly embarrassing and incredibly cruel.  It's only made worse by having seen, just like with "Black Panther", the exhilarated and thrilled faces of Black children seeing a snippet of Bailey's performance in the recently-released new "Little Mermaid" trailer.

Finally, while I already elaborated on this point in my earlier post on the white people freakouts prompted by "Black Panther", the point very much bears repeating in the form of questions: Why can't, or more pointedly, won't white people see themselves in people who don't look like them?  Do they have an expectation that everyone else see themselves in white characters, therefore it's somehow redundant or unnecessary for non-white characters to exist?  Or is the issue perhaps that entitled white people just don't freaking care about anyone else feeling seen, uplifted, celebrated, or empowered but themselves--that they want all media to be about them?

It strikes me that what we're discussing here is a children's movie.  We expect children to learn that other people are people and therefore to treat others with kindness and respect.  Starting at very young ages, based in this premise, we expect children to share.  Yet many grown-ass adults have managed to get well into their grown-ass adult lives never learning how to do exactly that, to the point that they feel comfortable blasting their racist selfishness all over the internet.

I don't know how to get through to these people.  That may simply not be possible.  But in the meantime, I'm glad that there are ever more depictions of characters from a broader array of humanity so that everyone can have heroes and imagine themselves in their place.

{Heart}