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In other words, if the majority can see people who don’t look like them in exalted positions - like, say, a princess - starting at a young age, perhaps they can get their mind around the idea that “others” are real people who deserve their respect.
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And when we get to star in these majority stories, that teaches people how to treat us.” “It is these mainstream productions that are seen by majority audiences,” Thomas said. And that, said Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination From Harry Potter to The Hunger Games (NYU Press), is key. To everyone else, they are other.ĭisney’s live-action Little Mermaid is not going to be the black version. And when we do get to star in well-known versions of mainstream tales like the 1997 Cinderella starring Brandy and Whitney Houston, or The Wiz, they are viewed as niche entertainment, largely seen by black people in black households in black spaces. When the majority culture controls storytelling, black people are essentially left out of the universal experience. “They can pretty much be whatever we want them to be because they are fantastical, yet their themes are universal.” “One of the gifts of fairy tales is they get to shift in our retelling of them,” Miller said. Yet this is not the point of fairy tales or myths, Miller said.
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Although, I would argue this is changing as more people have a platform in the age of the internet, such as when Scarlett Johansson played a Japanese character in the flop Ghost in the Shell.) (This is why pop-cultural history has allowed white actors to play real people of color, despite the blatant inaccuracy, such as when Cleopatra somehow resembled Elizabeth Taylor.
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It allows people, Miller said, to claim a certain cultural legitimacy because they can see themselves in a universal truth: “This story is about me. It’s natural for people, all people, to want to see themselves in bigger-than-life stories, whether they are the center of a fairy tale, cultural icons like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, or in the spiritual, like Jesus Christ. “It goes back to this idea that people want to cast the fantastic in their own images,” explained Madeline Miller, the Bryn Mawr-based author of the best-selling Circe, who is an expert in fairy tales and myths. And in the end, she doesn’t get the prince - like, at all. The sixth sister, as she’s known in the story, had a much harder row to hoe for trading in her fish tail for human legs. The story, originally published in 1836, is replete with religious references to souls and afterlife. Disney took serious liberties with Hans Christian Andersen’s original version of “The Little Mermaid,” who, lest we have forgotten, he didn’t even name. And I get it, it’s hard to see people mucking with your memories. The Little Mermaid was the first installment in Disney’s renaissance, released in 1989 and is a cultural keystone for millennials. Why are certain folks so upset about reimagining Ariel as black? The craziest? Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and the rest of the Good Will Hunting crew starring in Boyz N the Hood.īoyz N the Hood is about the specific experience of black men growing up in Compton. Then there was the slew of memes featuring white actors assuming traditionally black roles. Some people took their ignorance to the next level, suggesting black people can’t be mermaids because black people can’t swim - or get their hair wet. But please, pretty please, leave the beloved Ariel alone. Or better yet! Create a brand-new story with a black princess.
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That said Bailey is free to play Tiana, as they said. On the contrary, they were preserving culture. These folks weren’t racists, so they claimed. A petition demanded that Disney rethink Bailey. Within hours there was a “#notmyariel” hashtag. The impact of how this historic casting - the first time Disney selected a woman of color to play a white princess in its highly anticipated live-action reboots - didn’t even get a chance to register in my subconscious before I was hit by countless offending social-media posts from folks aghast that Disney changed the race of their beloved Ariel. When Disney announced Friday that the star of its Little Mermaid reboot will be Grownish actress Halle Bailey - not Halle Berry, as I and the rest of my Gen X cohort misread - I was like, that’s pretty cool.īut, admittedly, my excitement was tempered, if only because the last time Disney had a black princess, Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, she spent less of the movie as a princess and more of the movie as a frog.