Children’s films should not ignore the more difficult parts of our history, just because adults feel uncomfortable addressing them.
The question is: How do we make films for children of all races that acknowledge the horrors of historical events such as slavery, while making sure they are free to imagine a wonderful world unencumbered by racism and are not defined by it?
On Sunday, I watched the new live action version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid with my six-year-old son.
The visual effects are stunning, and the casting is brilliant. If you are not aware (and at this point you would literally have to be living under a rock in the middle of the ocean not to be aware), Halle Bailey plays the eponymous heroine in a celebration of normalising Black beauty standards for children.
While the importance of casting the Little Mermaid as a Black woman has been commented on in numerous articles, the casting of the other roles is also worth a mention. The casting is beautifully “colour blind”, with the prince being white and his mother being Black (he is adopted). 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 clearly does not exist underwater.
A world in which the very idea of race for the main characters seems to be subverted, while at the same time Black beauty is celebrated, needs to be applauded.
However, there is one massive problem with the film, and it is less about its treatment of contemporary racial issues and more about its treatment of historical transatlantic slavery.
The film is set in the Caribbean in the 18th century. It does not specify exactly when, but judging from the ships, clothes and other references, it is during a time of African chattel slavery. Despite this, there is not a single direct reference to slavery and the islanders live in racial harmony.
In this setting, I do not think we do our children any favours by pretending that slavery didn’t exist. 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.
The enslavement of Africans in the Americas (across the southern states of the US, Caribbean and South America) in the 18th century was a brutal time. It was a crime against humanity that is so heinous that there are calls to this day for reparations to compensate the descendants of the victims.
The 18th century Caribbean is a problematic time to set any children’s story, but that should make it full of creative possibilities, as opposed to encouraging historical amnesia.
I do not need every story and movie that my six-year-old consumes to be historically accurate. The appearance of steel pans in the film, an instrument invented in the late 1930s, raised a wry smile in the pedant in me, but I found it easy enough to overlook.
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. I do not want my child to think that the Caribbean in the 18th century was a time of racial harmony.
Does this mean Black children cannot have escapist fantasies of the past, or that all our historical stories have to overtly address racism and slavery?
Definitely not.
I want my Black son to be as free, joyful and unencumbered by horrors of history just as much as any of his white and Asian friends at school, but I also do not want him (or any children) to be given a false view of history on key issues.
There are several ways in which Disney could have easily set The Little Mermaid in the Caribbean in the 18th century and not whitewashed the region’s history.
For example, they could have set the story in Haiti, post-1804. Haiti was the first Caribbean country to throw off the shackles of slavery – and most importantly, in its constitution of 1805, explicitly denounces the idea of different “races” proclaiming true equality.
According to Julia Gaffield, a professor of history at Georgia State University, the constitution even “explicitly acknowledged that some “white women”, Germans and Poles had been naturalised as Haitian citizens, highlighting the radical reconceptualisation of race that underpinned Haiti’s entry on the world stage.”
