On July 3rd Disney announced that Halle Bailey will be playing Princess Ariel in the upcoming remake of 1989 animated film “The Little Mermaid.” When the news broke there was backlash for the white fanbase. They came out with every possible excuse to hate on Halle Bailey. Some even tried using science to justify their hate and anger.
I grew up on traditional Mermaid stories from my Grandmother. The indigenous Nations of the Pacific Northwest we have our own Mermaid tales. Mermaid stories traditionally exist all over the world. So thinking that Mermaids are purely a European concept is incorrect. But that’s not even the worst of the flawed thinking regarding this issue.
As a result, I wrote a detailed article about this topic https://geeks.media/why-your-reasons-to-dislike-halle-bailey-are-ridiculous
One thing I would have liked to have expanded on in the article is the positive impact that casting Brandy as Cinderella had in the 90s. I’m 100% certain that if social media existed back in the 90s, her casting and the casting of the rest of the cast would have been met with similar racist backlash. But more importantly, is the positive impact that Brandy had on young Black and Brown girls. Seeing her Sing “Impossible” with Whitney Houston as her fairy godmother gave us someone we could see ourselves in, we could see ourselves as a magical wonderful person who is worthy of miracles and magical adventures. Halle Bailey is going to be that inspiration for a whole new group of young people. That is a marvelous thing that should be celebrated. The good news is that for every hateful person out there being awful, there are people showing love and support to Halle Bailey right now.
I will be writing more about diverse representation in Family and youth media. As a parent I watch a lot of children’s programming, Some of it is really good in the way of having diverse characters and there are still area’s that need a lot of work. One being Indigenous representation. Sunday morning Disney released the first trailer for their live-action “Mulan” film I will be going a separate post of that later.
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