73 Think Piece: “We Need to Stop Celebrating ‘Diversity’”

Jocelyn Truong

Instructor Juliette Holder

ENG 1023.07

21 September 2022

We Need to Stop Celebrating “Diversity”

Disney’s teaser for its live-action remake of The Little Mermaid has amassed over 22 million views—and about 2 million dislikes, more than any other of Disney’s past trailers. The reason is this: Halle Bailey, an African American singer, has been cast as the main character Ariel, who was originally white. While many eagerly anticipate the debut of a new Black Disney princess (who won’t spend the majority of her movie in a frog’s body), the controversial race swap has prompted cries of unfairness from across the Internet, many of which take a stand against “wokeness” and “forced diversity” in response.

This level of backlash is well deserved, though for entirely different reasons. The issue isn’t that the new Ariel is Black—the character’s identity has never revolved around her race. So as far as audiences are concerned, if Halle Bailey can capture the essence of the Little Mermaid, then she is Ariel. She’s already knocked the vocal requirement far out of the park if the trailer has anything to say about it. But to tout a race-swapped role as a trailblazer for representation and an overall win for diversity in our media is a disservice to people of color.

Now, there is no doubt that representation is critical for minorities, especially as children. Growing up Asian-American myself in the 2000s and 2010s, I barely saw other Asians in Western media. Perhaps if I visited a friend blessed with cable TV, I could watch an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender on Nickelodeon, or catch a few scenes of Brenda Song’s London Tipton on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. But every time I stepped back into the world, all I had were mystical kung-fu wizards and thickly accented background caricatures to “represent” me as a little Vietnamese girl. My dignity was shielded only by a DVD copy of Mulan, and even then, Mulan would be the only notable Asian character I could name for years to come. At one point, I was so desperate to be seen in the media that I began hoping white celebrities with dark hair were at least part Asian. Eventually my childhood quest for Asian representation came to a close when I discovered K-pop and its burgeoning popularity in the United States. (a safe haven where Asians were finally cool), but the fact that I had to metaphorically “go back to my own country” before I felt seen in the media was disheartening in of itself.

With this being said, in the early 2000s and 2010s, I would have been thrilled to see any kind of Asian Disney princess grace the screen because, race-swapped or not, receiving any morsel of representation felt like a gift from above. The social expectations of the era gave Hollywood the OK to pretend minorities didn’t exist every time they didn’t feel like using us as punchlines (e.g., the Asian clique in Mean Girls) or plot devices to further the development of white characters, such as in Game of Thrones.

However, times have changed, and today’s entertainment industry is held to a higher standard for diversity now that social media has amplified activist movements and, in turn, demands for better representation. Original works that place people of color at front and center (Encanto, Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians, Moana, and Raya and the Last Dragon, to name a few) were partly given a platform because the masses could now hold Hollywood accountable for its racial prejudices. This opened a gateway for our stories to be shared to the world, diversifying the media that the general public is exposed to.

So why do we still pop champagne for surface-level representation via racebending, when the entertainment industry clearly has the means to give people of color stories of their own?

One could argue that representation is still representation at the end of the day. Given our barren state of affairs before, any sign of progress for minorities can be seen as a step in the right direction. Progress in this aspect is especially critical when 65% of characters in North American children’s TV shows were reported to be white in 2019, and whenever characters of color were depicted, they were very likely to be portrayed as stereotypes. Improper representation like this breeds psychological repercussions for kids, diminishing their self worth and often causing them to feel unimportant. Positive representation, in contrast, has been shown to improve children’s ethnic-racial attitudes and interactions, ultimately aiding their perception of interracial relationships and their own place in the world. The Little Mermaid trailer has certainly already accomplished this for many young girls who’ve seen it. If a well-written role like Ariel’s can ultimately help someone find their footing, why fret so much about whether or not it was a race swap?

Racebending’s fatal flaw doesn’t lie in whether or not it can represent people well. Issues arise when we as an audience embrace it with the same fervor we give to organically-diverse projects. Though race-swaps are technically an avenue of getting minorities into lead positions, the procedure is nothing short of a cop-out by the entertainment industry because most, if not all of those roles, still hand scraps from formerly white characters down to people of color (Spider-Man, Shadow and Bone, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, etc.). It’s performative to hold these projects on the same level as works already made with minorities in mind. By proudly celebrating these changes anyways, we uphold a dangerous norm where giving the bare minimum to minorities is acceptable. Settling for less tells little kids that they can have representation, so long as their beloved characters belonged to white people first. It indicates that as a collective, we are willing to turn a blind eye on lingering racism in our media the moment we are flashed with the sparkly branding of modern day diversity.

Additionally, applauding performative diversity teaches us that representation only runs skin deep and doesn’t require authenticity behind its intentions. In other words, we become trained to clap whenever we see a minority in the spotlight because they are a minority, not because we care for their significance as a character or what they’ve done as a person. In 2021, Chinese director Chloé Zhao won the Oscar for Best Director for her film Nomadland. News outlets and the Internet widely celebrated Zhao’s victory—not because they loved her work on Nomadland, but because Zhao was the first woman of color to receive the award, and therefore, her win was a win for Asian representation. Zhao’s individual accomplishment was eclipsed by the emphasis placed onto her ethnicity, even though it was her hard work (not her Asian-ness) that got her the Oscar.

The goal of diversity ultimately is to humanize and legitimize the existence of different groups of people to others beyond their sphere of exposure. When we make giant, yet superficial, spectacles of “representation” through race swapping in place of creating original stories for people of color, we diminish the value of those we are trying to represent. In turn, we unintentionally perpetuate racial biases in our media and veer our support towards performative actions, rather than fulfilling motions for better representation.

So please, before we blindly celebrate everything that vaguely resembles representation, perhaps we should take a step back to re-evaluate the state of “diversity” in our media, lest we sell ourselves and one another short.

Works Cited

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