This week, I had to re-read The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. The story was published in 1836.
The racist rants against the new live-action Disney version began moments after the company released the trailer for the film at the 2022 D23 Expo last week. For those who have dodged the flood of #notmyariel tagging on social media, the talented American singer and actress Halle Bailey was cast as the lead.
Bailey also happens to be a person of color and a real person. By “real”, I mean, a human entity physically occupying spacetime with consciousness and agency, participating in human society.
Ariel, the lead character in Disney’s The Little Mermaid and derived from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, is not actually real. Ariel is an ocean-dwelling fictional being that is half-fish and breathes water.
The little mermaid comes from a land ruled by the Sea King that is “far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal” says Andersen. “It is very, very deep; so deep.” It is also apparently a very sunny place. This oddly does sound like the Caribbean, but let’s put that aside for now.
We know the little mermaid was the prettiest of the Sea King’s six beautiful children and that “her skin was as clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea.” We also know the little mermaid has white hands, because as she would look out of her window (they had windows underwater) toward the humans on ships, she thought they “never imagined that a pretty little mermaid was standing beneath them, holding out her white hands towards the keel of their ship.” We also know the merfolk live up to 300 years and become foam at the end of their lives because they have no immortal soul.
Edvard Erikssen, statue of the Little Mermaid, Copenhagen, Denmark [Avda-berlin, Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0]
The little mermaid doesn’t marry the prince – who, by the way, has “coal-black eyes” – but rather participates in his marriage to a princess. The prince does say he would rather marry the little mermaid: “If I were forced to choose a bride, I would rather choose you, my dumb foundling, with those expressive eyes.” The little mermaid discovers that the princess “was really beautiful” and that she “was obliged to acknowledge that she had never seen a more perfect vision of beauty,” says Andersen “Her skin was delicately fair, and beneath her long dark eye-lashes her laughing blue eyes shone with truth and purity.”
At the end of the story – more spoilers — the mermaid is told to kill the prince by the Sea Witch. The little mermaid doesn’t kill anyone, and becomes an air elemental.
The critics unleashed their hate on Bailey because they claim Disney has violated the integrity of the source material.
No. It’s because they’re racists.
Bailey is Black and the critics have imagined an Ariel (only Disney’s name for the little mermaid, as Anderson, the source, doesn’t give her one) that meets their expectations of whiteness as purveyed by the original Disney animated film.
The first barrage of hate involved the undermining of childhood memories and erasure of the 1989 animated film. This sounds like white fragility, because Black and brown adults who were children and saw the original film have not seemingly been collectively traumatized to learn of Ariel’s representation as half-fish.
The transphobic troll Matt Walsh, who hosts the Daily Wire, shared that a Black mermaid doesn’t make sense because of science. “Also, by the way, with The Little Mermaid,” he said, “can we also just mention that, from a scientific perspective, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean.”
No? Meet the ultra-black fish species Anoplogaster cornuta. It turns out that – no, let me rephrase this. Real scientists explain in Current Biology that the black color makes deep sea fish harder to see and serves as an evolutionary advantage in the deep sea.
Another odd barrage of hate comments against Bailey suggested that mermaids come from European folklore, and, ipso facto, mermaids are white. Indeed, Pliny the Elder insisted he knew a guy who found lots of dead mermaids (nereids). But he didn’t bring his iPhone, so we didn’t have any pics. (Pliny documented it anyway to Emperor Augustus.)
Sadly, this is also mistaken.
Here’s a list of mermaids outside of the Continent:
- Cameroon: Jengu
- China: entities like Hai Ho Shang, also documented in the Yuezhong jianwen (粵中見聞)
- Colmbia: Hombres caimán
- Japan: Kappa
- Java: Nyai Blorong
- Korea: Sinjike
- Ojibwe: Nibiinaabe
- Makira/Solomon Islands: Adaro
- Ngarrindjeri: Muldjewangk
- Thailand/Vietnam/Azeroth: Naga and Nagini
- West Africa: Mami Water
- Zimbabwe: Njuzu
In One Thousand and One Nights, several tales reference the “sea people,” as well.
What does this have to do with Paganism? Well, bluntly, we have our own history of challenges with being open to people of color and allowing BIPOC members of our community to express their concerns without resistance and gaslighting.
There is also the obvious reinforcement of classical stories – many if not most are free from the assignment of human skin color to the characters – as racial narratives. Legends and myths express our stories – sometimes warning us about ourselves and other times admiring the grace of the human condition. They are never opportunities to weaponize words into racist panoplies. But the expectation that protagonists from myths or stories are white is cultivated in many spaces, including ours – particularly in the less inclusive areas of our “big tent.”
These are also the stories that are told in many Pagan faiths. It is our duty to remain alert to how they are co-opted. It has already happened in parts of Heathenry and the resistance against that co-option continues to be waged by antiracist Heathens.
Finally, one bizarre attack thread on Bailey and her new role bears mention. It has focused on Black people not having red hair. Those who say that need to have their eyes checked before packing to leave Whiteland.
While they are escaping, if they happen to be worried about the fidelity of the source material in regards to hair color: Andersen never mentions it. And anyway, may I remind you that the little mermaid is a fictional, half-fish teenager?
In the meantime – I suggest not looking at too many images of Jesus.
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