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Notes -
The trouble is, people are leaping from "if you say it's not appropriate for Ariel to be black" to "then you mean it's not appropriate for any mermaid to be black", which is a whole other conversation and assumption.
If they made a new movie with a black mermaid and gave her a different name and a different costume (and that's my point about the red hair: these are the identifying elements of Ariel as created by Disney, she has red hair and dresses in blue, just as Snow White has black hair and a red ribbon, and Belle has a yellow dress - little girls are very insistent on these elements to be correct or else it's not really Ariel or Belle or Cinderella or whomever) then yeah, objecting to black mermaids could be put down to "this is racism, would you say the same thing to a black woman applying for a job?"
But it's not, this is very specifically Ariel the Mermaid, an already created character with her set iconography and years of marketing to establish her, and making her black (while retaining all the rest of the iconography, including the red hair), then it's about cash grabbing and about hopping aboard the DEI bandwagon with as much sincerity as a cannibal declaring he's vegan (because my last meal was vegan, I asked him before I cooked him and he told me he was a vegan).
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