Black Activist Slams ‘The Little Mermaid’ For Erasing Slavery In The Film

Black Activist Marcus Ryder Trashes ‘The Little Mermaid’ For Erasing Slavery In The Film

A black activist is calling out ‘The Little Mermaid’ for failing to be historically accurate due to the movie taking place in the Caribbean during the 18th century, the peak of the slave trade.

Marcus Ryder, an influential British campaigner and chair of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, created a blog post about his thoughts on the movie titled “Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Caribbean Slavery, and Telling the Truth to Children”.

In the blog post, he applauded the movie for casting a black woman as Ariel, but he felt the movie fell short of the racial climate during that time. Ryder believes it’s important to tell an accurate story to children and not “whitewash” history.

 

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“A world in which the very idea of race for the main characters seems to be subverted, consciously ignored and at the same time Black beauty is celebrated, needs to be applauded,” Ryder wrote in a blog post. “At the same time the Little Mermaid’s father is White while her Mermaid sisters are of various different races and ethnicities. Race as a social construct, as we know it, clearly does not exist underwater.”

“In this setting, I do not think we do our children any favors by pretending that slavery didn’t exist,” he wrote.

“For me Disney’s preference to try and wish the inconvenient truth away says more about the adult creatives than it does about children’s ability to work through it. But the total erasure and rewriting of one of the most painful and important parts of African diasporic history, is borderline dangerous, especially when it is consumed unquestioningly by children,” he added.

“We owe it to our children to give them the most amazing fantastical stories possible to help their imaginations grow,” Ryder said. “We do not do this by ‘whitewashing’ out the difficult parts of our history. We do it by embracing our rich history and empowering them with the truth.”