The Little Mermaid live-action called out for lack of slavery representation

Among the slew of backlash The Little Mermaid live-action received, the most recent qualm was the lack of acknowledgement of the tragedy of slavery in the Caribbean.

As per Marcus Ryder, a well-known media diversity advocate, wrote in his blog following his experience of watching the movie and said that children should be made aware of slavery considering that the movie’s lead star Halle Bailey is Black and is set in the Caribbean islands

"I do not think we do our children any favours by pretending that slavery didn’t exist," he wrote in his blog, called Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Caribbean Slavery, and Telling the Truth to Children.

"Setting the fantastical story in this time and place is literally the equivalent of setting a love story between Jew and Gentile in 1940 Germany and ignoring the Jewish holocaust."

"We owe it to our children to give them the most amazing fantastical stories possible to help their imaginations grow," he said. 

"We do not do this by ‘whitewashing’ out the difficult parts of our history. We do it by embracing our rich history and empowering them with the truth."

"The sad reality is this great film left me concerned that Disney did not take seriously this very sensitive time and place which due to the atrocities that happened there should be treated very carefully – especially for impressionable children," he wrote.

Ryder also spoke to Deadline: "The whole affair points to how important representation is."

"And even though it was no fun to be the target of the Twitter onslaught, the positive I hope it demonstrates to film studios is that if you increase diversity you can get a loyal and committed audience that will defend your film vociferously from even the slightest perceived criticism, that is the type of audience engagement money simply cannot buy. Even if in this case I think the perceived criticism was misunderstood."