Mermaids, elves, chefs, cops and Victorian gentlemen

Welcome to another Deep Dive edition of Are You Sitting Comfortably?

The Deep Dives are longer posts where you will learn how to be vigilant to ideologies that surround us like water, and see how my mind actually works when it comes to exploring matters of identity.

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Sit back, settle in, and read on…

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It feels like a fever dream. Back in 2022, when millions of people all over the world actually managed to get #NotMyAriel trending, in protest to the casting of Haile Bailey in the lead role of a live action remake of a fictional, animated mermaid. Is the world out there so fragile that grown adults would really throw tantrums at the thought that The Little Mermaid might not be white?

It really happened. The trailer alone received millions of dislikes on YouTube, while social media playgrounds erupted into screams of sacrilege and wokeness gone mad.

And then, around the same time, did Lord of the Rings ‘purists’ really react so badly to news that Lenny Henry was going to play an elf in a new, prequel adaptation of the fantasy tale, that it briefly became headline news? 

Even in the realm of full blown fantasy, white supremacy finds a way of making itself reign supreme. 

Putting blackness into otherwise white roles almost feels like a solution to the representation gap, and I’m all for it, allowing the non-dominant other to take the lead. The very first time I personally saw this happen was back in 1993, when a sitcom called Chef aired on the BBC. It was all about an arrogant but gifted chef, who ran a posh restaurant out in the countryside somewhere and hated his staff. And here’s the thing, the chef was played by Lenny Henry, who is black and would play a fictional elf some 29 years later. It blew my mind. Even at eleven years old, I knew that Chef was bucking a trend by having a black lead in a role that could have, should have, surely, been played by a white man. Chef wasn’t about race and the protagonist’s skin colour was seemingly incidental. I watched every episode.

Years later, it happened again.