Actor, singer talent Halle Bailey takes a May 2023 cover of British Vogue with an interview “Making Waves: Halle Bailey On Reinventing The Disney Princess In The Little Mermaid.”

Law Roach styles the 23-year-old Atlanta native in Dsquared2, Gucci, Philosophy by Lorenzo Serafini, Prada, Ralph Lauren Collection and more in images by Sharif Hamza [IG].

For Hamza, this is his first British Vogue cover after shooting the debut cover and fashion story for Vogue Philippines last fall. The British Filipino-Egyptian photographer’s lineage is of great interest to AOC because it underscores the complexities of modern life when the focus is identity.

Back to Halle Bailey, she is interviewed by Jen Wang about her upcoming role as the lead of Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

“The version of Ariel in my head was the one we all know and love: pale skin and bright red hair. She didn’t look like me,” Bailey tells Wang.

Best known until now as one half of the pop R&B duo Chloe x Halle – with her older sister, Chlöe, 24 – Bailey caught the eye of The Little Mermaid director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Mary Poppins Returns) after she and Chlöe performed Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack’s duet Where Is The Love at the 2019 Grammys.

I bagged sharing Where Is The Love’ for the sisters singing America at the Super Bowl — but no embedding. So here they are at a BET event six years ago, singing the US National Anthem.

You’ll see where I’m going with this detour in a moment.

Bailey auditioned her heart out for The Little Mermaid. Rob Marshall was totally spellbound by Halle, but her acting experience was limited — and Ariel is the lead role. At every step of the way, Marshall found himself immersed in her excellence — even as he put more challenging obstacles in her way.

Marshall believed in his heart that Bailey owned the role with her charming, prodigious talent. But he also created major obstacles for her to not reach the highest bar of his expectations in the audition process.

**The MAGA Little Mermaid Revolt**

What was cast as more wokeness by the few was nothing more than a white privilege lie [AOC’s words.] No one else auditioning for Ariel could touch Halle Bailey’s command of the role.

After Bailey was announced as the lead, the Twitter hashtag #NotMyAriel started doing the rounds to argue, in the most vague, incoherent — and AOC adds ignorant — terms that the entirely fictional mermaid could only be white. I remember when that happened.

My Revolt Against MAGA Ignorance

The difference between AOC and MAGA is that we educate ourselves. And unless you just reject all of the historical record, and all facts about Denmark and author Hans Christian Andersen, MAGA is drowning in ignorance when they hit Twitter with claims that the author was Danish and therefore the Little Mermaid had to be white.

When I read Halle’s British Vogue interview last night [and being half Scandinavian Danish and Swedish on my mother’s side], I went looking for an AOC post.

There she was in all her glory — the statue of Mary Thomas called ‘I am Queen Mary’, the first public monument to a Black woman in Denmark.

The sculpture was inspired by Mary Thomas, known as one of "the three queens." The three women leaders unleashed the 'Fireburn', an 1878 uprising on St. Croix, in which 50 plantations and most of the town of Frederiksted burned to the ground in what is considered to be the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history.
After her conviction, Mary Thomas was not hanged -- which she surely would have been in America. She was sent to a women's prison in Copenhagen where her statue "I Am Queen Mary' sits in front of an original warehouse for Caribbean sugar and rum, a mere mile from where she was jailed.

AOC is like a dog with a bone with issues like this one.

What complete and total ignorance, ineptitude and lack of intellectual curiosity is expressed in the MAGA-led Twitter frenzy that said The Little Mermaid couldn’t be white because the author was Danish.

In five minutes this morning I established that there is evidence that HC Andersen had a level of awareness about race — and evidence of extreme discomfort around slavery —and he wrote these two short dramas: The Mulatto and The Moorish Girl, which are on the way for $11.00 about women of color. There may be more.

From my little bit of reading, there is a strong possibility that Andersen would be thrilled to have a beautiful young woman-of-color mermaid.

Searching for the symbolism of The Little Mermaid in Jungian terms [because I am a Jungian more than Freudian] what I get back is:

The little mermaid grows up wanting to be able to explore the land, but cannot with her fish tail. She sacrifices her beautiful voice to obtain feet. This exchange comes with the price of pain, bleeding, and never being able to return to the sea (which in itself is a loss of freedom).

Make no mistake, The Little Mermaid is too complex for MAGA. Update: It’s amazing but writing now the new V Magazine feature about The Little Mermaid, I have stumbled into the Hans Christian Andersen Centre in Denmark.

The intersection of Andersen and Jung is major and the psychiatrist had a profound impact on Andersen’s thinking. Their argument is that Andersen did not write mere children’s stories.

Thus, out of a specific Jungian approach, the comprehensive Fantastic Literature approach developed in time. . . . But this approach, then, immediately offers itself as a tool for seeing Andersen the story-teller in a perspective vastly broader than the worn-out international cliché notion of him as a children's author.

Now we know that The Little Mermaid is way beyond the comprehension of MAGA.

It’s shocking how they take the most expansive concepts and reduce them to a tiny rock of ignorant misinformation and misunderstanding. But it’s a pebble in our collective shoe, and it festers and infects our foot so badly that it causes doctors to discuss an amputation of the collective foot.

OMG! What if DeSantis calls to ban ‘The Little Mermaid’? It could happen if you follow my metaphor. This is a Disney film, and Disney just countersued the state of Florida and its governor Ron DeSantis. That’s the amputation.

Progressives Are Guilty of Revisionist History, Too

There is major room for a discussion of revisionist history among progressives. Cleopatra is really in the hot seat as we speak.

But The Little Mermaid is not one of them, and MAGA needs to get over it and give this uber-talented young woman Halle Bailey her due, while the rest of us focus on the intended meaning of the story. ~ Anne