Part of That World: Understanding Racebent Ariel

          I’ve said before that the public discourse around the current parade of live-action Disney remakes has been very contentious. Trying to have a civil conversation about the potential creative merits is something of an uphill battle. In most cases, this is just the general opposition to Hollywood’s penchant for repackaged material, but the mess does spill into other conversations.

            Take the casting announcement of Halle Bailey in the role of the upcoming remake of The Little Mermaid. When Disney announced on July 3, 2019 that the highly coveted role of Ariel would go to an African-American actress, you saw a lot of excitement from crowds championing fair representation. You also saw a lot of outrage, most clear in the trending hashtag #NotMyAriel.

            I hear a lot of people shouting that “Ariel has been white for two-hundred years. Why change that all the sudden?” But the fact is she hasn’t even “been Ariel” for that long. “Ariel” is the name the mermaid was given in the 1989 film nearly two centuries after the Hans Christian Andersen story was first published. A lot of what people assume is fairy-tale gospel is purely adaptational.

    Many small details from Andersen’s story make it into the Disney film (the polyps guarding the entrance to the sea witch’s lair, the mermaid doting on a life-size statue of the human prince, etc.) but a lot of what we just assume is baked into The Little Mermaid story is in fact unique to one singular telling. The mermaid in Andersen's story has an enchanting singing voice, which she trades to the sea-witch to walk on land, but the Disney adaptation adds the story beat of Ariel singing to Prince Eric as he wakes on the shore, and of Eric then searching specifically for the girl with that voice. Much like Ariel transforms herself in order to exist in her new element, Andersen’s Little Mermaid has been written and rewritten a thousand or so times over the centuries. Her defining characteristics aren’t her physical features but her appeal to an audience that believes there’s a better world for them. And for an audience living in a world that is still entrenched in social ills, including racism, allowing a POC actress to embody the character is very true to that essence.
             While I acknowledge the existence of deliberate, maliciously intended racism, I don’t think the majority of people pushing back against Ms. Bailey’s casting are all necessarily Sour Kangaroos trying to keep the Jungle of Nool under their authoritarian thumb. There's a lot of faulty rhetoric out there being pushed by people who should know better, and it’s an unfortunate window into how our society teaches racism that so many people haven’t given thought to how hurtful it is being told that you are #NotMyAriel simply because of your skin color. And I’m hoping that maybe some of the content in this essay can counteract that—maybe clarify why Halle Bailey’s casting in this movie is something to be celebrated. Because at the end of the day, everyone deserves the fairy-tale.

                        There a few things I'd like to disclose up front: One, as someone who is not a part of the African-American community, I can only discuss this subject from an academic perspective. I’m hoping that the ideas expressed in this essay benefit the black community, but I'll acknowledge that, yeah, this is a white dude talking about race. Some parts of essay will look take a broader look at the factors that affect historically marginalized communities as a whole, and other parts will focus specifically on black representation, and I'll try to distinguish between the two when necessary. It's further worth remarking upon that there is a wealth of opinion within BIPOC communities, and I can’t really do justice to the whole conversation within one essay.

                        Just so, there’s a lot of ground I hope to cover in this piece. I want to start by looking at some of the major obstacles that inhibit representation of historically marginalized people, especially the black community. Then I want to get into the politics of racebending. After looking at some of the major talking points surrounding representation and Disney, I want to examine why Ariel specifically makes a powerful candidate for racebending. 

 

Escapism and Responsibility

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

                        At the heart of storytelling is a desire to live vicariously through the exciting endeavors that we see play out on screen. But there have been patterns in who gets to be projected on the big screen. Hollywood has long reflected the stratified society from which it is born, and in that way, it has always favored white performers and white audiences. POC characters, when they’re allowed to be onscreen at all, have been shunted to minor character status and vulnerable to stereotypes. It’s only been in recent years that Hollywood has earnestly attempted to foundationally address these concerns, and there’s still a long way to go.

    In addition to blackness itself, many characteristics associated with historically marginalized communities (and black culture specifically) are penalized in mainstream Hollywood. African-American performers are pressured to straighten their curly hair or even anglicize their names to make them more palatable to white audiences. For years, actress Thandiwe Newton went by the more “acceptable” Thandie Newton and only reclaimed the more African spelling in 2021. Film history has denied audiences black and white the opportunity to see blackness linked with beauty, dignity, or heroism.

     This dearth of POC in Hollywood film not only means less job opportunities for POC actors, it means that POC audiences lack the space to see themselves as heroes. This is something white audiences never have to worry about because there's never been a shortage of white heroes onscreen. Actor Mason Gooding shared in a piece for Variety how watching Black Panther affected his self-perception as a black man in America:  

“Obscured among a sea of enraptured faces, I sat fixated on what an adolescent version of myself would have never thought possible. Call me a skeptic, but the over-abundance of heroes, idols and icons that more often than not looked nothing like me eventually allowed my psyche to slip into the dangerous notion that perhaps the way I looked was not in line with how the rest of the world saw a ‘protagonist” …

“It was in watching Chadwick as T’Challa that I began to believe in myself. I saw a version of myself, my brother, my friends, that I had only afforded myself in my wildest imagination; in this, I was not alone, but one of millions. For the first time in forever, I was meeting myself, and I liked what I saw.”

                        The #NotMyAriel crowd generally responds with, “But what’s the big deal?! They have Tiana!” And the other crowd returns with, “Yeah, and white girls have Rapunzel, Cinderella, Anna, Elsa, and Aurora--and those are just the blondes.” Given how readily available these role models are to white audiences, it’s no wonder that one of the methods of leveling the playing field is by allowing POC actors to perform traditionally “white” roles.

                        There is a wide range of discourse with POC communities on how specifically to dismantle the obstacles that stand in the way of this kind of representation. What kinds of practices need to be implemented to ensure minority voices are heard? What kinds of stories need to be told? Who gets to tell those stories? Lots of questions, lots of answers. But the underlying goal is increased visibility for historically oppressed communities.

                        Okay, that’s good and fine, but why Ariel? Why not just make a new princess specifically for the black community and let Ariel be the same as she is in the animated film?

                        We’ll get to that. But first, let’s dig deeper into some of the reasons why black performers have to fight for that spotlight.

 

                        Chasing that Spotlight

                    The crowd that resists black Ariel insists that it’s not about racism, they just want someone who looks like the animated character they grew up with. The narrative commonly levied here is that they would be just as upset if Disney cast a white actress in a live-action remake of Mulan or Pocahontas. The pro-racebending crowd usually responds saying that the two scenarios are incomparable because, unlike The Little Mermaid, race is an active agent within the story. Pocahontas as a story doesn’t work if the leading lady isn’t Native American.

                        This observation is accurate, but it underpins a more depressing point about the presence of non-white leads in Hollywood: POC protagonists are only permitted when they have an ironclad excuse for being anything other than white.

           We saw a microcosm of this during the 2020 Oscar season in which, of the twenty actors nominated, one non-white performer was recognized, that being Cynthia Erivo for her work in the Harriet Tubman biopic. Critics noted that, in a season that also saw movies like Marriage Story and The Irishman, it was revealing that the “runaway slave” was the only space in which POC performers were acknowledged.

                        This isn’t to undersell the efforts of the filmmakers behind Harriet or other movies like it. These trailblazers deserve to be celebrated. But the exclusivity of the love surrounding these types of movies kind of misses the point. Pioneers like Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. were superheroes so that historically marginalized communities today wouldn’t need to be. All that trailblazing was done so that members of historically marginalized communities could have the same opportunities as their white neighbors.

                       And yet, black characters are still only permitted the spotlight when they can be used as warriors, focal points for white spectators to signal their support for social justice. They aren’t allowed to simply exist. This is one of the reasons why there’s a growing movement among POC voices pushing for representation that doesn’t make a spectacle out of ethnic trauma. In her book, "Expanding the Black Film Canon," Lisa Doris Alexander wrote on the depiction of black adolescents in film,

The Hate U Give (2018)

“According to those narratives, while black teenagers may contemplate college like their white counterparts, they do their homework to the sound of gunshots. Even if they are not involved in criminal activity, they can still be gunned down in the streets. In other words, black teenagers do not have the luxury of simply being teenagers …” 

                        Similarly, Racquel Gates, associate professor at The College of Staten Island, noted how black films are judged almost exclusively for how they educate white viewers on racism, which is such a limited range of the human experience. Gates wrote in a New York Times op-ed, 

The Photograph (2020)

“Even as filmmakers like Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay and Barry Jenkins have found recent success in telling these kinds of stories, Black film is still too often assessed for its didactic value, with artistic and intellectual contributions deemed secondary. We need to emphasize the works of Zeinabu Irene Davis, Yvonne Welbon, Garrett Bradley, Marlon Riggs, Dee Rees, Cheryl Dunye and other filmmakers who tap into themes on Black peoples’ experiences as individuals, and how those experiences are shaped by race, sexuality, class and countless other social realities.”

           So it’s not just the absence of black faces in film. The film world is also very strict and limiting about the space in which the black community is allowed to exist. Blackness must be linked to trauma and hopelessness, and always in the service of providing white people with figureheads to signal their allyship.

        This well-intentioned fencing can have lasting effects on the community it purports to be championing. Consider one of the most common roles for black actresses, the “strong black woman” archetype. Melissa V Harris-Perry, describes warrior of justice in her book, “Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America”:

The Long Walk Home (1990)

“She confronts all trials and tribulations. She is a source of unlimited support for her family. She is a motivated, hardworking breadwinner. She is always prepared to do what needs to be done for her family and her people. She is sacrificial and smart. She suppresses her emotional needs while anticipating those of others. She has an irrepressible spirit that is unbroken by a legacy of oppression, poverty, and rejection.”

                        While all this might sound like an ideal, it’s also very limiting. It sets an expectation for the black community to embody every single virtue, leaving very little room for human error. This model also implicitly suggests that the black community has it within them to rise above obstacles of racism if only they tried harder, which puts it on them to fix a mess that white people made. Recent research has indicated that the prevailing archetype of the “strong black woman” contributes to poor mental health among black women. As Harris-Perry further notes, “When seeking help means showing unacceptable weakness, actual black women, unlike their mythical counterpart, face depression, anxiety and loneliness.”

                  From a young age, black audiences are socialized to believe that they only deserve the spotlight when they offer up their trauma, which can be a very damaging message to send. Given that the roles naturally offered to black performers are incomplete, it’s little wonder that racebending is even a thing, let alone that it’s so popular.

 

                        The Ethics of Racebending

                     The term “racebending” has entered the discourse over the last few years to describe the act of altering the race of a character in adaptation. Characters like Arthur Curry in DCEU’s Aquaman, Red in The Shawshank Redemption, and even Wednesday Adams stand out as high-profile examples of characters originally conceived as white in their original text being reimagined as POC in film adaptations. 

    There's a sub-narrative plaguing the discourse claiming that racebending is somehow a direct competitor to the act of creating original characters conceived as POC from the get-go. "Disney should just create more original black characters and leave Ariel alone. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk." These kinds of narratives needlessly pit the two approaches against each other while also ignoring that Disney and other studios actually are increasingly crafting original stories centered on diverse cultures, and we'll get to that. This reduction also overlooks one of the appeals of racebending, that being how characters originally written as white are often free of the stereotypes assigned to roles that are written for POC actors. There are cases to be made for both racebending and for writing original POC characters, and pretending that it's an either/or situation helps no one.

    Another a similar attempt at a counterargument is that racebending only ever goes one way. Again, there’s that common line how “everyone thinks they’re so open-minded, but you just know if they cast a white woman as Tiana, they would flip their lids!” My reaction to this is usually something like, “Yes, and why wouldn’t they? Tiana is one of the only dark-skinned leads in children’s entertainment. Why would you take that away from the black community?” Removing those rare windows for exposure hurts POC communities. They know because, even if decriers will never acknowledge it, this happens to them all the time.

                        Film history is full of examples of white actors taking roles with specific non-white ethnicities. From classical film you have instances like Natalie Wood portraying Puerto-Rican immigrant Maria in 1961’s West Side Story, but there are more contemporary examples as well. In 2012’s Argo, you had Ben Affleck portraying a real-life person, Antonio Mendez, despite Mendez being Mexican American as well as white actress Clea DuVall playing Cora Lijek, who is Japanese.

             The term racebending was actually coined to describe yet another instance in which actors of color lost out on a chance to be onscreen. The infamous live-action film adaptation of Avatar the Last Airbender, which takes inspiration from various Asian cultures, saw every major role played by a white actor. (The awkward exceptions being the Fire Nation, the bad guys …) The internet described the one-sided casting as “bending” in reference to the elemental bending that makes up the fabric of this universe.
                     So while nowadays the term is more often used to describe the reverse, even the term “racebending” has roots in the act of blocking POC actors. Trying to force a parallel between white audiences giving up one of their many auxiliary tokens and POC audiences facing an uphill climb to see themselves onscreen at all, that ignores the reality of how society is constructed.

                        Racebending in period-piece stories presents a special challenge because you’re faced with the question of representation vs authenticity, and this is another place where you find diversity within the discourse. Within the POC community, some people are here for racebending in all things to increase the presence of POC actors, while others see it as simply a more sophisticated version of whitewashing.

                        On the one hand, the dearth of POC representation in period films has long been dismissed as a sad byproduct of historical racism, but not one we could do much about, and historically marginalized communities inevitably lose out on chances to be onscreen. On the other hand, disregarding historical racism runs the risk of sanitizing history, permitting white audiences to not have to grapple with how these systems have tried to erase these groups for centuries and influence how such systems play out today. (Another criticism sometimes lobbed at The Princess and the Frog is the way it downplays the existence of Jim Crow Laws, which enforced racial segregation in the southern U.S. during the early 20^th century.)

Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

             Generally these particular critics grant a little more leeway in historical fiction that is decidedly fantasy-based, especially those that take place in an alternate world. In stories where magic and monsters are just part of the fabric, you’re already moving away from reality, and storytellers can make the executive decision whether it’s useful to carry with them the loaded racial politics of the real world. This blank slate creates room to imagine that you could have a black princess or a Latina fairy in a world that resembles medieval Europe. 

    You do have fringe groups who demand absolute historical accuracy in all things—groups that can tolerate talking fish but not multiculturalism--and they like to make their presence known in times like these. Most fantasy-based fandoms have that crowd that decries POC characters for existing in their chosen universe (see: the pushback against “Rings of Power” for casting black elves) but promises it’s not racist for them to do so. This is the crowd that insists that black mermaids are a scientific impossibility, and I’m just going to let that speak for itself …  

              Like many Disney fairy tales, and like much of historical fantasy, the setting of Disney’s The Little Mermaid evokes a pastiche of vague Europeanness, but where? And when? You sometimes see fans try to peg it in 1830s Denmark in reference to the original fairy-tale, but in that case what’s the French chef doing here? Again, the story is planted less in any historical setting and more set in “Once Upon a Time” time. We’re seeing more storytellers electing to mythologize their fantasy world in order to ignore, or at least work around, the racial dynamics that inhibit representation. And times being what they are, I can think of a few reasons why.

                        I guess now is as good a time as any to discuss The Princess and the Frog, and I want to start by establishing something:

 

Tiana Shouldn’t Have to do Everything

                       The Disney Princess brand has been the most formative force in the socializing of young girls over the last few decades. Formally instituted at the turn of the century, the brand organizes the leading heroines of fairy-tale films from the Disney animated catalog into one space for the enjoyment of young girls everywhere. The figureheads of this brand are some of the most powerful socializing forces in the lives of their target audience, teaching young girls about kindness toward others and courage in the face of opposition.

                        A popular rite of passage for young girls has been going to the Disney Parks to meet their favorite princess, maybe even imagining that when they grow up, they can themselves perform as a princess at the parks. White girls have always had the luxury of wondering whether they'll grow up to play Belle, Cinderella, or really most of the princesses on the deck. Black girls, meanwhile, have only one option. Before 2009, that door was closed entirely. The line’s Asian and Native American members, Mulan and Pocahontas, are generally treated more as recurring guest stars than prominent members, leaving Jasmine to serve as the catch-all princess for 70% of the world’s population.

                        It was a big deal, then, when Disney announced in 2008 that they were developing a feature film adaptation of “The Frog Prince” which would feature the line’s first African-American princess. Said co-director Ron Clements,

“It was certainly about time [for an African American heroine]. But we didn't approach this movie with that as any kind of agenda. John Lasseter suggested taking the fairy tale ‘The Frog Prince’ and setting it in New Orleans. The idea of making our heroine African American simply grew out of the setting and that was an integral part of the story we pitched to John in March of 2006. We all thought it was a great idea. But it wasn't until later that we fully realized the importance of this in the African American community.”

                        Tiana was one of the first black leads in a mainstream children’s film, and while the choice to feature an African-American princess was widely praised, the execution of the film’s racial politics has been met with varied responses from critics at large—not unthinkable given that the film’s crew was still mostly white.

                        Tiana has echoes of the archetypal “strong black woman” who is defined by her strength and ambition. A central piece of her character arc is her wanting to open her own restaurant in 1910s New Orleans, and unlike many of her predecessors, Tiana does not start out the film believing in fairy tales or wishing on stars. We can attribute part of her hyper-competency to Disney’s new millennium urgency to create strongfemalecharacters™, but compare how Disney empowers Tiana versus princesses like Rapunzel or Anna. Tiana’s white contemporaries are allowed to be bubbly and vivacious while Tiana herself gets to be the no-nonsense go-getter with fortitude to spare. Again, not in and of itself bad, but still limiting.

                        Then there’s the fact that Disney’s first black princess spends most of her film with green skin. Critics sometimes read this trope as an attempt to make a POC protagonist more palatable to white audiences by functionally removing their race from their character.

               I don’t want any of this to come across as being overly critical of the character because there is a lot to love about Tiana. (For one thing she’s the rare modern Disney heroine who’s actually permitted a real character flaw.) From what I’ve observed, she is widely celebrated within the black community. If there are blind spots in Tiana’s portrait of black femininity, a lot of this comes from being one of the first black protagonists in a mainstream children’s film—she has to check off a lot of boxes, much more than any one character should ever have to. And this is yet another reason why it’s important that mainstream films prioritize featuring POC characters, especially as leads. How has Disney done in that regard?

                        In the wake of The Princess and the Frog, Disney has actually continued to produce stories featuring characters of diverse backgrounds. In addition to movies like Moana, Raya and the Last Dragon, and Encanto which tell stories inspired by underrepresented cultures, you also have movies like Big Hero 6 and this year’s Strange World which feature a diverse ensemble cast. We’ve also seen Disney making efforts to increase the POC voices behind the screen as well with talent like Charise Castro Smith (co-director on Encanto) and Adele Lim (head screenwriter on Raya and the Last Dragon). On that note, it’s also worth acknowledging that Disney has done more to allow Tiana’s story to be told from the lens of black storytellers. See: Walt Disney Imagineering placing Charita Carter as head of the upcoming “Princess and the Frog” attraction coming to Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom, as well as Stella Meghie helming Tiana’s upcoming Disney+ series.

                        The upcoming “Little Mermaid” remake is also not Disney’s first foray into racebending. One example that I often see cited is the 1997 TV Movie adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. The show has become something of a tentpole for colorblind casting, most notably for casting Brandy as the title princess opposite Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother. At the time of the film’s release, Whoopi Goldberg, who played the queen, shared in an interview with Jet Magazine, “Before, it was either all-black or all-white, but never a normal mix of people. This integrated cast is how the real world is. This is more normal than being part of a cast that doesn’t have any color in it.”

                        You actually see a lot of racebending in the stage musical adaptations of Disney films. In 1998, Toni Braxton became the first black actress to perform as Belle on Broadway. During her run, Alan Menken even composed a new song for Belle written specially for her, called “A Change in Me” which has in the years since become a mainstay on the show’s roster. Even more recently, the 2021 London revival of the show featured two black leads with Courtney Stapleton and Emmanuel Kojo. Disney has made similar moves in other stage productions. When The Little Mermaid premiered onstage in 2008, Norm Lewis originated the role of King Triton, and when Frozen opened on Broadway in 2018, Jelani Alladin originated the role of Kristoff.

            But the above examples are all television programs or else stage shows where the actors are easily swapped. They don’t hold as much authority in the canon. Not like an actor in a fixed text like a film, which will still be the same film years after its original release. Because that’s really why this casting is so notable. Here you have a POC actress taking the role of a Disney Princess in a tentpole feature film. For the Disney fanbase, this movie is essential viewing, one way or another.

                        But it’s also not just the scale of the project that’s significant. It’s also the character at the center of this conversation. What about the big question?

            Why Ariel?

Halle Bailey is a black actress stepping into the role of a highly popular character that has historically been played as white. That is itself a sort of statement. That is saying something: this character is not exclusively white. But there are also messages inherent in declaring that this character is not exclusively white. See, a lot of the dialogue around dispelling racism forces audiences and storytellers to choose between escapism and reality, but The Little Mermaid’s unique politics create a special middle ground where featuring a black Ariel can speak to the social landscape of the day while also transcending it.

            Circling back to our discussion on roles allotted for black female actresses, it’s easy to see why Ariel as a character stands apart from most of the roles played by black women in mainstream media. Note the character traits listed in Bailey’s casting announcement: spirit, heart, innocence, youth, and the like. This kind of personality can be a breath of fresh air growing up as a black woman in America when popular media seldom allows you to be anything other than loud and fierce.

This speaks to one of the biggest issues with tokenism: it only allows for very specific experiences to be represented onscreen, inevitably falling back on caricature and stereotypes. There’s no breadth to capture the range of the human experience or personality. Maybe someone relates more to a down-to-earth and driven role model like Tiana, or maybe Ariel’s bubbliness and dreaminess speak more to their personality. The point is all audiences deserve that option.

           And, yes, you don’t have to look like a character to relate to them. Tiana can be the favorite princess of a white viewer just as easily, and Tiana isn’t necessarily the default favorite of all black viewers. But we also can’t remove race as a factor, not when race continues to be a defining feature in how people are treated offscreen. Either way, it’s by this same logic that casting a black actress in the role of Ariel shouldn’t alienate white viewers.

            The politics of the animated film also deserve mention. The most popular social-centered reading of the film is probably the queer reading, this owing in large part to the LGBT voices who authored the story. You have Hans Christian Andersen, who penned the original fairy-tale and was also bisexual, and you have gay artists who made the Disney film, like animator Andreas Deja and lyricist Howard Ashman. The story also has a lot of story elements that invoke the LGBT experience (e.g. Triton throwing a tantrum when Ariel is symbolically outed as a human lover). But one observation that has recently come into focus about The Little Mermaid, even before Bailey’s casting, is the film’s comment on racial prejudice.

     Let’s revisit the plot of Disney’s The Little Mermaid: 

           A young girl finds herself drawn to a community and culture that is different from her own. Her own society actively discourages interaction with or even mention of this other world. Ariel's father claims that the humans are “All the same! Spineless, harpooning fish-eaters! Incapable of any feeling!” but her curiosity and open-heartedness draws her further into this new sphere. She sees in this other community a shared sense of humanity and goodness, “I don’t see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad,” and she questions the social structures that keep the two worlds apart. At great personal risk, she crosses boundaries that separate these communities. By staying true to that flickering light of hope, she finds happiness not only for herself, but also leads the way in closing the divide between two worlds.

        So it's clear that of the many angles by which one can read the story, The Little Mermaid is also a story about overcoming social division and that Ariel herself is this beacon of utopia. And if you really want to dig into the meat of the conversation, that element of the story actually comes from the Disney adaptation.  In the original fairy-tale, the Mermaid isn’t crossing this communal taboo in seeking after the humans. In Anderson’s story, going up to the surface world is actually a rite of passage for the mermaids, and it's on her premiere visit to the surface that the titular mermaid first falls in love with the prince. But the Disney film saw the potential to reimagine the story as one of making peace between two divided communities. This is where we get story elements like Ariel disobeying her father and the wisdom of her culture to be a part of that world, and this really cuts against the argument that casting a black actress is somehow working against the grain of the Disney film. If anything, it's the next logical step.

Moving the race element beyond subtext creates a unique middle ground for exploring race on film. The humans and merpeople are divided, but they’re not subjugating each other, and so you don’t have to dive into some of the loaded or triggering material that usually accompanies representations of racism. Being part of an underground (underwater?) community doesn’t mandate that Ariel become this war-scarred fighter whose every breath is an act of rebellion against the powers that be. POC audiences don’t want to only ever see themselves as fighters or survivors. Sometimes they just want to play around with starfish and dinglehoppers.

    One of the things that made Black Panther so different from previous mainstream depictions of race was that it depicted black people as powerful. It’s not just that you had a black superhero, but that this superhero hailed from a country where blackness was shown as something powerful and prosperous, and that power wasn’t inextricably linked with social trauma. The people of Wakanda weren’t strong because they had endured so much. They were strong. Full stop. 

Moreover, Black Panther put black audiences in a place where they could see themselves as the central agents in their own fight for racial equality, not just victims depending on the mercy of white allies. Yes, you had Martin Freeman playing a sympathetic white dude who helps out T’Challa, but he was one in a cast of mostly black characters, and the crux of the story came down to T’Challa’s decision to share Wakanda’s resources with the world. Black Panther is also another example of how positive representation isn't as simple as just imagining that racism doesn't exist. The colonialization of Africa heavily informs Wakanda's politics, and T'Challa's character arc largely comes down to how he decides to combat worldwide racism.

This dynamic echoes in the upcoming remake which places the mantle of heroism on the black mermaid princess who chooses to correct the social divisions of her world. I suppose there still could have been an element of enlightenment had they opted for a white Ariel falling in love with a black Eric, but the centrality of the story also plays a factor. Ariel is our heroine. She’s the star. She’s the one we’re all here to see. There are a lot of areas in mainstream media and society at large that need correcting, but the biggest trophy of all has been that center ring.

I'll confess it's not clear at present how this may or may not have motivated Disney's decision to use Ariel as their first major case of racebending in a live action remake (they've since followed with casting Latina actress Rachel Zegler as Snow White), or whether the remake will choose to lean into the racial subtext (it wouldn't surprise me, for example, if there was more overt prejudice between the merfolk and the surface world in the remake). It may have just taken Disney until recently to think through the implications of revisiting their animated catalog pre-1999 without opening up any doors for increased representation. Either way, there’s a lot that gets buried under the narrative of “Hollywood and their agendas!” It’s not just as simple as Disney trying “go woke.” Princess Tiana herself, Anika Noni Rose, put it best when she commented on both Halle Bailey’s casting in The Little Mermaid and Yara Shahidi’s casting as Tinker Bell in Disney’s upcoming Peter Pan remake:

“I am a firm proponent of the fact that children need to see themselves in fantasy. They need to know that they exist in the whimsical, that they exist in magic. That they are worthy of the crown. It’s really important that they know that. It's important that we see ourselves that way and it's important that our children's peers get to see them that way because it changes the DNA in children in the way that they are able to move through the world. It changes the way that their peers expect to see them."

 

Wanderin’ Free

The irony undercutting this whole circus performance is that both people who celebrate racebent Ariel and those who protest it are actually after the same thing: escapism. Taking a historically white princess like Ariel and having her be portrayed by a black actress confronts the lay viewer with how the Disney Princess brand, and many other casts like it, are overwhelmingly white in composition. This itself reminds us how much work there is to be done to achieve social equality, and there is a lot of work to be done. The average viewer dives into entertainment precisely to escape thinking about such social realities, and for a white viewer uncomfortable with having those conversations, blocking that escapism can feel like a betrayal or a violation.

    To clarify I am in no way trying to excuse the vitriol dealt out by racists. It isn’t fair how much members of historically marginalized communities, especially those in the public eye, have to endure simply because some people have never given thought to their privilege. The counternarratives spun against things like racebending ignore how POC communities don’t have the luxury of pretending that the broken racial dynamics don’t exist and don’t cause them real harm. Hence, the need for dramatic gestures like casting a black actress in a traditionally white role.

It's worth acknowledging that achieving social equality depends on more than any single action by any single film. I don’t want to place too much importance on this movie as the one shot the black community has at the spotlight. There are other movies that advance racial equality, probably even more than this one, especially if you look outside of mainstream Hollywood. Films where you have minorities behind the camera as well as in front of it. Films like those Gates mentions in her New York Times piece.

         I myself haven’t yet decided whether or not this remake will be a theater experience for me. I’m still holding out to see whether the inevitable plot changes are done with a mind for people who actually like the animated film, or if it’s more of Disney confessing their insecurities about their own brand in that way that feels slightly too revealing ... (We get it, Disney. Buzzfeed told you that Snow White would never sit at the cool table with all the other strong female role models, and you just never really got over it, but you should really talk with someone about that …)

    At the same time, whether or not a person purchases a ticket to see The Little Mermaid on the big screen, that person has control over the larger dialogue surrounding a black actress playing a “white” Disney Princess. And I’m hoping that those of us who don't have to personally bear the brunt of the backlash will be self-aware enough to look outside our own lived experiences and consider what this might mean for the little girls who are getting to see that they are, in the words of Rose, "worthy of the crown." Maybe more than just holding our tongue, we'll be bold enough to politely correct misinformation that gets passed around and, when necessary, call out flagrant hate speech when we see it.

    Bailey has recently shared with Variety what seeing someone like her in this kind of role growing up would have done for her own self-perception, 

“I want the little girl in me and the little girls just like me who are watching to know that they’re special, and that they should be a princess in every single way. There’s no reason that they shouldn’t be. That reassurance was something that I needed.”

            There’s a lot about the remake that’s still up in the air, as of this publishing. We don’t know how Alan Menken’s new songs with Lin-Manuel Miranda are going to stand next his work with Howard Ashman. We don’t know whether the choice of a comedic actress like Melissa McCarthy for Ursula is going to serve the villain well. We don't know how live-action Sebastian is going to look with his live-action mandibles rapping to "Under the Sea" live-actionly. There’ll be time for those discussions. 

    For now, though, all that we really know about the film is that it’s going to help a lot of children see themselves in a space that is wholly fantastical and magical. And maybe that’s something we ought to celebrate.

                     --The Professor