The New Little Mermaid is Black, and Some People Can’t Handle it – Why?
A couple of weeks ago, Disney released a teaser trailer for the much-anticipated live action remake of The Little Mermaid. Viewers watch as soaring waves give way to underwater reefs, sea turtles, a shipwreck and then – a mermaid’s iridescent tail.
The Internet was quick to note that this tail belonged not to the Caucasian, red-headed Ariel of early ‘90s fame, but instead to a young Black woman – R & B singer and actress Halle Bailey (from the show Grown-ish), who makes her feature film debut in the role.
The trailer proceeded to garner millions of dislikes and hateful comments on YouTube, while also provoking a stream of satirical memes mocking the film’s choice to cast a Black actress in an originally “white” role. (Though no one seems to have given much thought to the fact that mermaids, as fictional creatures, have no confirmable “race” to speak of.) As so often, the hateful comments claimed Bailey’s casting was a betrayal of the original film and a disservice to fans who were hoping to see their beloved 16-year-old, white “girl next door”.
Happily, Internet crusaders from the opposing side were also poised to satirize this absurd, racist, and hysterical response. They quickly pointed out that nobody seems to think twice when white characters play characters of color (or otherwise diverse backgrounds), e.g. Tilda Swinton playing a Tibetan monk in Marvel’s Doctor Strange franchise:
While the meme undoubtedly makes a good point about the hypocrisy of these contentious reactions, it doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. For me, this issue comes down to a cultural form of white supremacy. At its most extreme and political, white supremacy refers to the belief that white people constitute a superior race. But there are subtler, more insidious forms of it that pervade our nation’s cultural consciousness. This form, in which “whiteness” is a prerequisite for participation in art or culture, is what I mean by “white supremacy” (we’ll dive into this topic further in an upcoming article – stay tuned!).
The racist gatekeeping that comes from fans who decry the unfaithfulness of diverse casting in fantasy or classic remakes – or the anachronism of including people of color in period pieces – is another way of controlling what people from underrepresented backgrounds get to do and achieve in the public sphere.
For me, a much more incisive take on the situation is summarized by this viral tweet:
The affront, in other words, is not to Little Mermaid fans’ sense of childish wonder, but to white people’s sense of what is appropriate, right, plausible, or acceptable for Black people to do in popular culture. These fans have no interest in the possibility of recasting The Little Mermaid as a young Black woman, because to do so would (a) “take” something away from “white culture” and (b) welcome Black people more fully into the experience and joy of the film.
You have only to watch some of the touching viral clips of Black girls and women responding to the trailer to understand how meaningful this sort of representation can be to our community.
What’s ironic about this controversy is that The Little Mermaid has always been a symbol of progressive ideas in children’s filmmaking. The movie was conceived and written at a time when Disney was in financial crisis after producing a string of box office failures. Michael Eisner took over the company and decided to slash animation budgets, which he deemed too expensive and too risky for the present state of the company. In a slightly panicked response, the animation studio at Disney reached out to two Broadway veterans, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, to revamp the Disney approach. The two agreed, provided they were given creative control and license to deal with taboo subjects in whatever they created.
The result was 1989’s The Little Mermaid, a highly queer-coded tale of a young girl coming out to her family about who she truly wants to be. In the process, she runs away from home, bartering her voice for human legs with an independent, strong female antagonist (Ursula the sea witch, who was modeled on a real-life drag queen named Divine). She eventually fights back against the witch, at which point her family accept her decision to live as a human. Howard Ashman, who was gay, may even have been inspired by the fact that the original Danish fairytale version of The Little Mermaid (1837) was almost certainly written by Hans Christian Andersen as a love letter to an unrequited (male) love.
The fairytale and the 1989 Disney film have always been about pushing cultural boundaries and representing taboo or otherwise underrepresented aspects of society. And in the early ‘90s, it paid off. Disney entered a period of cultural renaissance as it came out with blockbuster hits like The Lion King, Aladdin, and Pocahontas in subsequent years.
Many of these films played fast and loose with cultural appropriation back in the 1990s – Aladdin, for example, presents a world that conflates elements from Indian, Middle Eastern, and North African cultures as if they’re all the same thing. But they also, of course, introduced a generation of American children to stories from diverse cultures outside of a purely Western tradition (Mulan is another similar example).
Since then, Disney has attempted to address its rocky history with a more careful approach to its past and current films. For example, when you watch Aladdin on Disney+ today, you first read a disclaimer acknowledging the insensitivity of some of the film’s cultural portrayals.
So to me, Halle Bailey’s casting is just another in a string of efforts on the part of the cultural giant – and one of the most valuable brands in America – to reflect the changing views and racial composition of the culture it serves (and profits from).
Critics of the casting choice see the invisible hand of the “woke police” at work, forcing companies like Disney to make choices that pander to a progressive sense of social justice. But at the end of the day, Disney hasn’t made this choice merely because it cares about Black representation. This is a business decision, like any other. The cultural debate and controversy it has fueled will only increase PR and awareness for the film (which has taken years to get off the ground). All while bringing in key demographics that continue to grow in numbers year-on-year (the multiracial population alone in the US grew by 276% between 2010 and 2020).
What’s unclear, from the perspective of these critics, is just how a Black mermaid is going to harm Disney, the remake, the film’s legacy, popular culture, or children’s lives today. The best these critics can do is level an accusation that Disney has a responsibility to remain “faithful” to what fans deem an immutable character.
This kind of cultural racism isn’t limited to Disney movies. The new Lord of the Rings show on Amazon Prime has come under similar attack for daring to portray diverse characters in what Tolkien scholars claim was intended to be a melanin-free Middle Earth.
Beyond the many realms of fantasy, this debate has popped up in period pieces and popular works of art that depict historical narratives. The argument here is that there’s no room for actors of color in artistic portrayals of historically white people or characters. The inaccuracy (similar to the “unfaithfulness” in fantasy) is blamed as an irresponsible representation of something that never could have been.
The massively popular historical romance Bridgerton predictably came under criticism for presenting an extremely diverse cast, featuring Black dukes, duchesses and even a Black Queen of England. Produced by Shonda Rhimes, the Black producer of Grey’s Anatomy and other mega-hits, the show presented an alternate historical reality in which people of color weren’t prevented from participating in the upper echelons of early 19th century British society. But despite these vain cries in defense of historical accuracy, the show has been one of Netflix’s most successful endeavors.
The issue becomes more complex when these historical pieces engage subtly, overtly, or implicitly with issues of race. Which is exactly why a different kind of criticism was eventually leveled at the Broadway hit Hamilton, following its initial success. While many critics have claimed that the musical’s diverse cast was intended to reclaim our nation’s origin story for nonwhite communities, others have pointed out there is little engagement in Hamilton with the fact that the Founding Fathers (Alexander Hamilton among them) were involved in the slave trade. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator behind Hamilton, has responded with relative equivocation, accepting that “all criticisms are valid” and defensively explaining that he did the best he could with the source material “in a 2.5 hour musical.”
I bring up these other examples because it’s important to engage critically with artistic representations that operate at the intersection of history, race, and/or popular culture. The discussions are especially necessary when we’re considering what greater good the relevant works of art serve. For example, you might argue that despite its potential shortcomings, Hamilton’s success did recast a traditionally white narrative in visual and musical languages that implicitly center nonwhite and immigrant backgrounds. (The extent to which it succeeds in getting modern audiences to engage with the reality of the actual history is another story.)
The bigger issue, of whether “color-blind” or “color-conscious” casting is meaningful or tokenistic, therefore depends heavily on context. The issue is also not limited to race – many in the LGBTQ+ community have noted how often gay and trans roles are played by cis-gendered, heterosexual actors (e.g. Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl). In theory, anyone should be able to play any role. But when there are marked inequalities in an industry – as in Hollywood, as everywhere else – there’s a reason people advocate for more equitable representation.
As I noted above, and as Disney and many other companies well know, diversity is good for business. If we accept that the next generation is already the most diverse in recent history, then it makes simple business sense to have our cultural products – and indeed all our corporate environments – reflect this change.
I commend Disney for making a bold choice that will mean so much to Black children and their families. I know I’m personally much more excited to share this film with my two girls as a result of their casting choices.
But let’s never forget that popular backlashes like the one against Halle Bailey and The Little Mermaid are expressions of cultural white supremacy and the privilege it demands for white artists and audiences. No one has the right to gatekeep a work of art or decide who gets to participate in it, re-invent it, or experience it in new ways. The original creators of The Little Mermaid knew that. Let the re-make be a lesson to those who refuse to get the picture.
Porter Braswell
