Jacqui Palumbo
On July 3rd, Disney announced that 19-year-old Halle Bailey would
be the latest actress to star in a string of live-action reboots. Bailey, who
is black, was cast as Ariel, the wistful redheaded mermaid who gains her legs
to walk among humans. Lightning-fast digital artists offered up new fan art for
The Little Mermaid on Twitter, while trolls attempted to sow discord across
social media. Not everyone who deplored the casting choice is a bad actor,
though. There is an understandable impulse to preserve childhood nostalgia, but
Disney’s version from 1989 is not the source material; neither is Hans
Christian Andersen’s allegorical tale from 1837, which is much more gruesome
and nearly ends in the protagonist murdering her prince.
Ariel’s story really begins in Ancient Greece.
According to lore, she is a nereid, one of the dozens of daughters of the
sea-god Triton. This isn’t the first time that the internet has been set alight
over the suggestion that famous figures of antiquity could be anything but
white.Last year, black actors playing Achilles, Patroclus, Zeus, and others in
Troy: Fall of a City (2018–ongoing) evoked similar ire. The year before,
Classics scholar Sarah Bond was targeted for her essays for Forbes and
Hyperallergic dispelling the myth that Greco-Romans and their sculptures were
homogeneously white. People in Western antiquity were a range of skin colors,
and their statues were actually painted in vivid colors. Bond argued that the
continued idealization of white beauty in art fuels contemporary white
supremacy beliefs.
That argument is grounded in history. The Western standard of white
beauty in art can be traced back to the 15th-century discovery of a Roman
marble statue, Apollo of the Belvedere (circa 2nd century CE). In a seminal
1764 treatise, which became the cornerstone of modern art history, Johann
Joachim Winckelmann celebrated Apollo Belvedere as the pinnacle of beauty. The
statue also became the foundation for Dutch anatomist Pieter Camper’s notions
that beauty could be measured from facial proportions—notions that would later
fuel Nazi Germany’s ideas of Aryan supremacy, and continue to be referenced in
far-right circles today.
Our entire Western, modern sense of race can be traced back to the
era of the Scientific Revolution, which “was marked by a desire to categorize,
label, and rank everything from plants to minerals,” Bond wrote. “It was only a
matter of time before humans were similarly subjected to such manmade systems
of classification.”
Race is a social construct, and prejudices function differently by
culture or era. Today, “we mistake race for physical appearance,” said Rebecca
Futo Kennedy, a scholar of Greek and Roman history, languages, and culture.
“Race is not the physical markers; it is the way that we structure ourselves.”
She emphasized: “Not everybody’s concept of race has been shaped by the
transatlantic slave trade.”
Ancient Romans did not have a racially structured society. Their
slave trade was based on the bounties of war—anyone was one fight away from
becoming a slave. Freed slaves became citizens, creating a hodgepodge of
ethnicities under Roman identity. The Greeks, on the other hand, had various
“micro-identities” based on their polis. Some city-states were racially
structured—Athenians and Spartans, believed themselves to be superior, but it
varied by region.
But across both civilizations, depictions of gods and goddesses
weren’t intended to be naturalistic representations of people, Kennedy said,
but creative interpretations. Assigning a simplistic modern view of race or
skin color to an ancient goddess is faulty by nature, because their creators
didn’t have the same sense of race and ethnicity that we do. Doing so “is such
an act of projection on our part and a desire to claim ownership of the unreal
and the imaginary,” Kennedy said.
Nereids weren’t given particularly distinctive personalities to
differentiate between them in Ancient art, but they have appeared on vases, in
mosaics, and as relief sculpture and statues. Their skin color could be
symbolic of gender or age—young maidens were often pale while adult men were
depictedin reds, browns, or black—but colors were also determined by the
medium. In one Greek vase painting from the Archaic period at the National
Archaeological Museum of Tarquinia, black nereid figures circle Heracles
fighting a sea god. In a plate from the Late Classical period at
the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, a red nereid hitches a ride on
the back of a slightly displeased-looking dolphin. Greco-Roman mosaics range
from pale to reddish-brown skin tones.
Marble lunette with Nereid riding Triton , 1st
quarter of 2nd century A.D., Roman. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Greeks also experienced color in a wholly different way than we do
today. They lacked a word for the color blue, and the Homeric “wine-dark sea”
of both The Odyssey and The Iliad has stumped scholars and scientists: It has
been suggested that Greeks were congenitally colorblind, or their wine was
actually blue, or there was an outbreak of red algae in the Medditeranean Sea. According to scholar Maria Michela Sassi, there’s a more poetic
explanation. Ancient Greeks had a complex and specific “chromatic culture,” she
wrote, and instead of defining specific hues, they categorized colors by their
other qualities, like movement, or light. The sea was like wine because of the
way it glittered in the light.
There is one thing that hasn’t changed much
over time, however: the belief that our gods look like us. We see it today
through the persistent and pervasive belief in Western society that Jesus was
white. Likewise, in antiquity, a fragment of a poem by the 6th-century BCE
Greek philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon stated Ethiopians believed their gods
were black while Thracians imagined them pale and red-haired. It is not so much
that we were created in God’s image, but the other way around.
But Western society is not uniformly white,
and representation should follow. Tiana from The Princess and the Frog (2009)
shouldn’t be the token princess for young black girls to look up to. Disney
characters, based on goddesses or otherwise, are idolized with near-religious
fervor, and offering diversity to encourage a positive self-image can be a
powerful cultural marker.
One Twitter user emphasized just how important representation was
for her. “As a white-skinned redhead, I have very
strong feelings about #TheLittleMermaid. Ariel changed my ginger world. The
mean ‘jokes’ ended. I became envied for my hair. And you know what? I want
little black girls to experience that same feeling with new Ariel.”
Ariel can be any race, because race is a social construct, and
mermaids can be whatever color we please, because they don’t exist. If we’re
going to go by the source material, the representation in ancient mythology
fully supports fluidity between retellings.
“We have dozens and dozens of versions [of myths] because everybody
re-conceptualizes them through their own lens,” Kennedy said, explaining that
Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians and the like each had their own versions. “To
try to create them and crafted into singular versions that can’t ever be
changed is fundamentally opposed to how myths functioned in the ancient world
where they were created.” In short, bring on the black mermaids in the
wine-colored seas.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-greek-mythology-tells-mermaids-shades?utm_medium=email&utm_source=17518569-newsletter-editorial-daily-07-17-19&utm_campaign=editorial-rail&utm_content=st-V
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