Racism is as American as apple pie, or like the very air we breathe. These are not exaggerations.
ABOVE: Halle Bailey, the African-American actress who plays the Disney heroine, has received a flood of racist comments
24 September 2022 – Just a few seconds after Halle Bailey’s face appeared on the screen, social media went wild. Ariel, Disney’s famous mermaid, was now Black. The American actress and singer appears at the very end of the trailer, released earlier this month. The movie is a live-action adaptation of the 1989 cartoon and directed by Rob Marshall. Since then, the hashtag #notmyariel has trended, accompanied by negative comments, many of them racist and speaking of betrayal and nostalgia for the red hair, blue eyes and pale skin of the fishtail princess.
On Twitter, a screenshot showing Halle Bailey’s face but with white skin and changed features had plenty of time to be shared before the account was suspended. By contrast, videos with the hashtags #representationmatters or #blackgirl went viral, especially on TikTok. They showed children, filmed by their parents, with huge smiles as they found out about Disney’s new heroine. “Oh my God, she’s Black!” and “Yes, yes, yes,” were heard from a group of enthusiastic siblings watching the trailer.
Halle Bailey took to Twitter to say how impressed she was with the positive response. As for the less positive comments, the 22-year-old wrote, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” She is known, along with her sister, for the R&B duo Chloe × Halle and for their roles on the series Grown-ish.
She first faced a wave of hate back in 2019 when it was announced that she would be playing Ariel. In August, she told Variety magazine about how important support from her grandparents had been. From that interview:
“It was an inspiring and beautiful thing to hear their words of encouragement, telling me, ‘You don’t understand what this is doing for us, for our community, for all the little Black and brown girls who are going to see themselves in you’. It was marvellous”.
Stephanie Troutman Robbins, associate professor at the University of Arizona, agrees. She is the co-author of Race in American Television which I read for my upcoming monograph on the writer James Baldwin (due out in 2023) and in an interview about the “Black Little Mermaid” she highlighted the importance of representation for children and said:
“Just look at the joy of these little Black girls watching someone who looks like them in a role that usually doesn’t look like them. It’s fundamental. Even though some people struggle with it, having more representative children’s literature and movies is going in the right direction, including for White children who don’t live in a multicultural environment”.
In her book Robbins noted that in 2020, two out of three African-Americans felt their lives were not adequately represented on screen and 74% of respondents said that inclusive content was a determining factor in watching a program, part of an in-depth survey by the National Research Group.
Disney knows this full well. In the past, the company had been attacked for the lack of diversity in its characters, and it is taking a significant step in this area. Up until now, just one of its princesses has been Black, Tiana in The Princess and the Frog, an animated film from 2009. Said Robbins in the interview I noted above:
“And even there, she was a frog for half of the film. Here, they have deliberately chosen one of their iconic characters. Ariel may not be Snow White or Cinderella, but she is part of their repertoire of princesses. Regardless of the color of her skin, there is a universal aspect to this character: that of a young girl who wants her independence, wants to change her life and is faced with the consequences of her acts. In this regard, Disney’s choice is interesting, without a shadow of a doubt, and I’m sure they are taking a calculated risk”.
On Broadway in New York City, there was no debate when a Black actress was chosen to play Hermione in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Nor did the casting of Black actors as the nation’s Founding Fathers (led by George Washington) in the musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. But that does not stop the controversy. In early September, Amazon had to defend its series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in the face of mounting criticism over the diverse cast. “Middle-earth is not all White,” Amazon replied to the Tolkien fans who complained.
In the case of the Disney adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale about a mermaid, published in 1837, Robbins said:
“In fact, we’re talking about a mermaid, a fictional character who does not have to be White just because she was White in a cartoon from the 1980s. Representations do not have to be static. Most authors also know that, once they have put their work out there, it is subject to different interpretations.”
Nobody got upset about the fact that Disney changed Andersen’s original fairytale in 1989 to give it a happy ending (in the original, the prince marries a princess in an arranged marriage, the Little Mermaid thinks of all that she has sacrificed and all the pain she has endured for the prince, her heart breaks, and she kills herself).
Thirty-three years later, Disney’s new Little Mermaid, slated for release in theaters in May 2023, has already achieved a feat: the trailer has been seen over 20 million times.
POSTSCRIPT
The demand to keep politics out of art is too often a demand for art to conform to conservative politics
Earlier this month, CNN published a news story featuring an interview with Brandon Morse, an editor for the right-wing website RedState, in which he complained that Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings show, “The Rings of Power”, is integrated. He said:
“The producers have cast non-White actors in a story based on European culture and who look wildly different from how Tolkien originally described them. This is an attempt to embed social justice politics into Tolkien’s world.. If you focus on introducing modern political sentiments, such as the leftist obsession with identity issues that only go skin deep, then you’re no longer focusing on building a good story”.
Demanding Jim Crow casting requirements for a show on which the concept of race applies to elves and hobbits indicates a rather profound “obsession with identity issues that only go skin deep”. The primary tensions in Middle Earth are among races even more fictional than the ones that divide contemporary society. The fact that its cultures are inspired by real-world history does not rationalize imposing patterns of migration, conquest, and exploitation onto a fictional universe in which they did not take place. J. R. R. Tolkien’s tendency to essentialize his fictional races, giving them intrinsic moral qualities, is the subject of a great deal of research and commentary. But that is way beyond the subject of this post.
What is interesting to many is that someone is willing to express such sentiments so explicitly. Backlashes against Black actors being cast in prominent genre roles are almost reflexive at this point, but the critics usually avoid stating outright that the integrity of the work requires an all-white cast. Most of the time, they stick to the argument that inserting politics into art diminishes the quality of the acting or storytelling, even if the shows merely acknowledge the existence of people who are not white or straight or men. The benefit of Morse’s candor is his clarity that his demand to keep politics out of art is itself a demand for art to conform to conservative politics.
And really it is about more than that, as Adam Serwer (culture and entertainment writer for The Atlantic magazine) notes in a blog post:
“Representation shapes how people think of themselves and others, for good or for ill. And beneath the culture war nonsense are real questions not just of representation but of labor, of who gets to make a living in the entertainment industry as an artist or creator. These controversies and harassment campaigns seek to narrow not just the industry’s imagination, but also who can get paid to do this kind of work. People enraged by Black actors playing elves or mermaids are not any happier about Black writers or directors.
What is ultimately true, though, is that the “right” politics cannot make art succeed, and the “wrong” politics won’t prevent it from succeeding, at least in a commercial and popular sense. The work has to resonate. Most people’s tastes do not align neatly with their politics, and to the extent that people want such alignment, they typically just talk themselves into thinking the art they like shares their politics. This is not to say all political art or criticism is bad, or that popularity is by itself a measure of artistic merit. But weaving political themes into a story line, or evaluating a film or movie solely through the prism of one’s politics, is insufficient to make it brilliant or profound. Sometimes, in fact, doing so inadvertently exposes the shallowness of the art or the argument”.
But this also misses what I think is the overriding arc of racism in America.
The everyday life of the segregation era is not much discussed outside academia. More attention is given to large events — court decisions, laws, protests — and to the heroism of the movement, the horror of extraordinary racist militants, lynchings, bombings, and the murders of civil-rights activists.
Missing from these discussions is a sense of how the segregationist regime was held together, what practical purposes it served. It is identified with abstractions like prejudice, bigotry, racism, and an eternal white supremacy – which tell us nothing about how the order operated, how its official and unofficial protocols organized people’s lives.
What those without intimate knowledge of the regime are left with is a vague sense of the bad old days when bigots and bigotry reigned. That impression obscures the most basic truth of the white-supremacist South: it was a coherent social order, constructed and maintained by specific social interests through political and economic institutions that channeled the experience of everyone in the region. Even the familiar imagery of separate water fountains, lunch counters, and restrooms feeds misunderstanding by representing those features as the summary reality of segregation. Although its intent is usually the opposite, this picture of the Jim Crow era reduces segregation to its most superficial artifacts, to the tip of the iceberg. It misses how embedded it is in American society.
It also encourages two apparently opposite misunderstandings. As Adolph Reed notes in his book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives:
“On one side is the view that simplistically celebrates the defeat of the segregationist regime as the defeat of entrenched inequality, which shares the same genus as the contentions that Barack Obama’s election demonstrated that the country was “post-racial.”
On the other hand, a view expressed more and more commonly as the era recedes in time contends that the civil-rights movement’s victories were trivial. An extension of this view, which was retailed by Malcolm X and other black nationalists, is that the struggle against segregation was misdirected, that fighting to desegregate lunch counters and restrooms, for example, reflected a demeaning presumption that black people needed proximity to whites for validation. The problem, we hear with disturbing frequency and emphatic self-confidence, in particular from younger people, was not the principle of “separate but equal” but the fact that it wasn’t honestly enforced. These contentions fundamentally misunderstand the reality of Jim Crow”.
Separate never was intended to be equal. The sole purpose of the segregationist regime, which did not take shape until the 1890s and early 1900s, was to enforce black subordination as a virtue on its own as well as an instrument for other ends.
The relatively superficial mechanisms of enforcement — the petty apartheid of Jim Crow take-out windows at restaurants, separate water fountains, toilets, etc. — were never trivial to those who endured them on a daily basis. They were never less than massively inconvenient and humiliating.
But as James Baldwin detailed in so much of his work, it missed how embedded these mechanisms were and how they were inseparably linked to a larger system that included denial of due process and equal protection under the law, and the extremes of economic exploitation made possible by the elimination of citizenship rights. “Separate but equal” was never more than a paper-thin ruse to support the fiction that this system did not violate black people’s constitutional rights.
People who are oppressed know it — by definition. It strains logic to imagine how one could not notice being brutalized, demeaned, and denied effective recourse. A crucial error made by exuberant radicals since the Sixties, at least, has been assuming that their discovery of exploitation and oppression must also be fresh news to the more beleaguered victims. I read Revolutionary Suicide, the searing, visionary memoir of founding Black Panther Huey Newton, and you learn (if you did not know already) that the Black Panther Party’s dogma was that political mobilization required demonstrating the reign of police terror in urban Bantustans, or the conviction that black Americans needed to be told that they were black, are only striking cases in point. This is why their exhortations and preachments are so commonly met with bemused responses. They self-righteously announce the obvious and offer only unthinkably remote, millennial routes to justice like “revolution” or “unity” or, now, “reparations.”
And therein lies the problem. Even the weak and powerless have tacit awareness of the fundamental injustice that shapes all social interactions, is baked into the system.
Racism is as American as apple pie, or like the very air we breathe. These are not exaggerations. The systemic racism embedded deeply within American social institutions’ policies, rules, regulations, laws and day-to-day life have segmented Americans’ experiences along racial lines. That will never be removed.