R
Rhubarb
Guest
No, it isn’t. Blackface is more than just smearing grease paint on a white person’s face. The contexts of it are far more complex. Blackface was designed specifically to mock African-Americans - that was the focus of it. People dress up, smear on the paint, and act the fool so the audience can laugh at the “black people” depicted. This version of Ariel isn’t that.
The reason why whitewashing is bad is because there is already a plethora of roles for white actors. This means not only that white actors are less-limited in the parts they can play, and that white audience-goers have no problem finding depictions of people that look like them in media.
Characters of color are far more rare, not as strongly-written, and, even more rarely thought of as able to lead a movie outside ‘ethnic’ films. So when a character of color is whitewashed, it not only takes bread out of the mouth of an actor of color, but deprives society of a chance to be impacted by characters of color - to see them in positive lights, and so on and so forth. Allegra’s post above mine explains this very well.
And I would highly suspect that anyone who doesn’t understand why lack of representation in media is a problem is a white person - who has never had to endure being underrepresented and don’t understand what that experience is like.
Also. As lots of posters have said before - Ariel is a fish-person. A made-up bit of nonsense meant to delight children. So long as the the actress they chose can play the part and sing, what’s the problem really?
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No "happily ever after"s for the poor in his stories. If he had written “Cinderella,” she would have died in the ashes, perhaps with one of her mouse friends to comfort her but likely not even that, while one of her stepsisters rode off into the sunset with the Prince.