image by Nseh Benajah

Representation matters, and so I’m paying close attention to Halle Bailey’s turn as Ariel, aka, the little mermaid, in the upcoming remake of the classic Disney film. Since they released a teaser last week, my attention has been particularly celebratory, besotted, motherly: the TikTok videos of young brown girls beaming with astonished, unfiltered joy as they realize that this Ariel is brown/Black, like them, are revelatory and gorgeous.

But it’s not all roses. For one thing, I’ve taken some very deep breaths after seeing the asinine outcry from people who cannot handle the idea of a Black little mermaid. Black Twitter has served up trenchant, pithy, and hilarious responses to the nonsense, and I have just two things to add: (1) This is nothing new — we see the same complaints when Black characters appear in Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Thor, Titans, Superman, The Witcher, and more; and (2) the reason this is nothing new is because attempts by white people to define what can, cannot, or must be “white” are deeply and inextricably rooted in the racism and white dominance that underwrites our culture and country; like, that right there — the insistence that whiteness is a thing from which some people must be excluded and in which other people must be wrapped and protected at all costs — is literally the mental and moral fallacy at the heart of white-dominance. Just sayin.

I’m also bracing myself for the damage The Little Mermaid remake may yet do to my daughter even as she gets (and I get!) something intangible and intensely good from seeing the new, Black Ariel.

I was 8 or 9 when my mother let me see the original Little Mermaid, my first Disney movie. It was playing in the small, stucco building of the local movie theater, and I was enthralled, my fingertips oiled with fake popcorn butter, the thick red swoop of Ariel’s floating hair and the dark underside of her bangs, the pale, impossible angles of her thin waist, the massiveness of her eyes and tininess of her chin capturing my imagination.

Within the strokes of the animator’s pen was a potent definition of beauty and a clear message about the trajectory of female lives: girls give up who they are born as in order to fulfill their destiny, which, of course, is to secure male desire and get married. To put a finer point on it: girls literally alter their physical nature (mermaid to human, tail to legs) and shrivel their vocal cords (the mute damsel) to fulfill their destiny — marriage. It was the body project intersecting explicitly with the marriage plot. (You could argue that the story portrays a young woman taking action to pursue her dream, but that doesn’t get you very far: her dream is to be physically transformed, to have a different and “better” body.)

Funny — or maybe painful — how the metaphor of Ariel’s body transformation cleaved itself to my actual life. I have endured countless diets and punitive exercise sessions trying to shape my body into the kind of body I thought boys, and later men, wanted. This diet-and-exercise madness began when I was 4 or 5 — before I saw The Little Mermaid — because my family thought I was “too chubby.” So I can’t pin my entire experience on Disney.

But seeing The Little Mermaid was consequential because it presented the quest for a different body in childish terms, in the slinky, seductive grammar of fairy tales, in a language I spoke and understood as my own. It presented beauty and ugliness as a binary that interlocked with goodness and evil, desirability and repugnance — consider Ariel’s opposite, Ursula, whose body is protuberantly fat and therefore reads in this particular culture as odious, out of control, and vile, just like her unpleasant personality. (Interesting sidenote: turns out you can predict whether a Disney character is a princess or a villain based solely on their waist-to-hip ratio.)

I could not, at age 4 or 5 or 8 or 9 (when I saw The Little Mermaid), see my body as sexual; but I understood that something about my body was a site for (cis-het male) desire, or lack of desire. Beauty and ugliness mattered; I was trapped in the binary, and the binary was encoded on every female body, including very young female bodies, that I encountered in tv, movies, books, music videos, and magazines, and often in real life. I understood even then that when my sister pressed sparkling shadow onto her eyelids or my mom scooped SlimFast powder into the blender, it had something to do with ugliness vs. beauty, and also with male desire — needing it, its absence suggesting a hopeless present and a hopeless future, too. As sociologist Heather Laine Talley writes, “Girls dream of being beautiful — but perhaps equally important, girls fear being ugly. While the intense desire to be beautiful certainly generates insidious consequences, anxieties around ugliness can be taxing too…fearing ugliness is, at core, a fear about the future — as if a good life is exclusively determined by what we look like [emphasis added].” The Little Mermaid rhymed with, and compounded, the messages I’d already absorbed from the culture, then wrapped it all in a pretty, child-sized pill.

I want my child — a little brown girl — to see her racial identity(s) reflected positively in the media. I also want to spare her from awareness of the male gaze, and awareness that her “beauty” and its ability (or lack of ability) to elicit male desire are still considered paramount in this culture, for as long as I possibly can. As a mother, I consider this a core job responsibility.

The problem with The Little Mermaid, no matter who plays Ariel, is that it makes my job harder, not easier. Unless they’ve rewritten the story, this new version, wonderful though it is to see Halle as Ariel, is still propaganda. It is still pushing the message that beauty and ugliness are two ends of a spectrum that can and should shape your life, that reveal your value and character. It is still pushing the message that marriage is the ne plus ultra of female ambition. It is still pushing the message that girls should sacrifice their nature — their bodies and their voices! — in pursuit of their dreams. I cannot think of a more insidious and degrading lesson to teach girls, or boys, or anyone, about the relationship between who we are and what we want, between what we look like and the lives we’ll lead.

Yes, my job as a mother is also to roll with the culture punches, to find teachable moments, to help my child develop cultural literacy, to deal with it. I get it. I don’t demand that all media conform to my personal and political standards, and I don’t expect a world in which I never have to explain anything complex to my child. In fact, we may see the movie simply to enjoy the racial equity it nods toward, and to celebrate and support Halle Bailey.

But I wish they’d really seized the moment over at Disney. I wish they, too, were committed to helping girls see much, much more than body projects and marriage when they gaze at the horizon, or in the mirror. I wish they’d found a way to make The Little Mermaid part of the world we want, not just part of the world we have.