During a recent segment on his Daily Wire show, host Matt Walsh responded to a viewer who said that Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid featuring Halle Bailey, who is Black, as the lead character was an example of ‘white erasure” — a sentiment that Walsh agreed with.
“…what I cannot abide by is the double-standard thing where we say the race in casting matters only for certain races and not for others,” Walsh said, adding 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.”
“I mean, if anything, not only should the Little Mermaid be pale, she should, actually, be translucent. If you look at deep sea creatures, they’re, like, translucent,” Walsh continued. “They have no, kind of, pigmentation whatsoever. And they’re just, like, these horrifying — they look like skeletons floating around in the ocean.”
“That’s what the Little Mermaid should look like. She should be totally pale and skeletal where you can see her skull through her face,” he concluded.
“And that would actually be a version of The Little Mermaid that I would watch.”
Watch the video below, via Media Matters:
