As a Palestinian, I wish there had been something like Mo on TV when I was growing up. I’m speaking from personal experience here: the other day I found myself unexpectedly shedding a tear because Mo Amer was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon talking about how his new Netflix show, Mo, is “the first ever show created by, starring a Palestinian, and showing a Palestinian family on television”. It can be hard to understand how dehumanizing it is to be constantly sent the message that people who look like you can never be heroes. If you take that representation for granted then it can be hard to understand how important it is to see yourself included in popular culture. He grew up with no end of TV shows and movies starring boys who looked like him. Walsh is an able-bodied thirtysomething white guy. Walsh clearly has an active imagination so I’d like to suggest a little thought experiment to him: try imagining a world where you grew up rarely seeing someone like yourself be a hero onscreen. Walsh later said what all racists say when people call them out: his statement about a Black mermaid being unscientific was a joke! Which would have been a lot more convincing of an argument if Walsh hadn’t built his brand on far-right views. They have no kind of pigmentation whatsoever … should be totally pale and skeletal where you can see her skull through her face.” If you look at deep-sea creatures, they’re translucent. If anything, not only should the Little Mermaid be pale, she should, actually, be translucent.
#Magical meltdown no response skin
Walsh told viewers of his eponymous show that “from a scientific perspective, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean. He fixed The Little Mermaid and turned the woke actor into a ginger white girl.” Shortly after the Twitter account added: “This is purely for educational purposes, please do not misinterpret this in a racist way.” Uh huh.Ĭonservative political commentator Matt Walsh also spent a lot more time thinking about the physiology of fictional creatures than is healthy. A (now-suspended) Twitter account jubilantly shared the altered trailer, announcing: “Credits to our memer Artificial intelligence scientist. An anonymous computer scientist, for example, went to the trouble of using artificial intelligence to whiten Halle Bailey’s appearance in the trailer. While there may be nothing new about bigots raging over animated entertainment, this particular backlash is noteworthy because of just how unhinged the response has been. I don’t know how they have the energy to care about cartoon polar bears it really must be very exhausting. Earlier this month, for example, the right were getting het up over a lesbian polar bear family in Peppa Pig.
There seems to be a backlash about diversity onscreen every five minutes. It’s not just the Little Mermaid: rightwingers, the people who love telling liberals to toughen up snowflake, routinely get their knickers in a twist over animated entertainment targeted at the four-to-12-year-old crowd.
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