The Little Mermaid’s Scissor Statement

9 min readSep 18, 2022

The newest battlefield for the culture war has gone down where it’s wetter, down where it’s better, as Disney has released the trailer for their upcoming live action adaptation of the hit film The Little Mermaid. Despite the casting being announced decades of culture-war-years ago (one year ~ fifty culture-war-years), people are choosing sides and making videos because ditch the porcelain skinned ginger mermaid, folks — this Ariel is black. Or brown, or a BIPoC (this one always strikes me as weirdly dehumanizing, but hey, it’s what the kids are using).

…She has melanin, is what I’m saying.

Why is her bikini not sea-shells? is my main question

In some ways, folks, this one is so… hard… to care about. Mostly, I don’t, and I don’t want to (I’m more upset that our culture is simply re-churning animated Disney movies but this time with real people and shitloads of CGI than the skin color of a person). Hallie Bailey’s voice is ethereal in the “Part of Your World” clip we see in the trailer — I’m sure the movie will be fine.

For some people, though, this is a big deal.

Now, do I think someone can both be not racist and prefer they had cast someone more like the OG Disney Ariel? For sure. Do I think someone can think it’s nice that a live action Disney Princess has melanin so that their daughter can say “She looks like me!”? For sure (…with some caveats).

But when the latter group looks at the former group and says, “LOL, you care what skin color the fish woman has?” while at the same time singing to high heavens how awesome it is that Disney has done this? When mothers are filming their daughters’ reactions (…most of which I’ve seen, I really have to note, do not seem to give a fart — it’s almost always the parent foisting happiness onto the children to get the reaction desired for TikTok), you can’t call this an incredible thing while also ridiculing people who are upset with “LOL it’s a fake story about a fish woman, racist!”

Disney has, for the record, cast a black-skinned actress in the role of a character known to be a white Disney princess before. It was the 90s, and Brandy was the star of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s Cinderella for “The Wonderful World of Disney,” produced by, you guessed it, Disney (now, it wasn’t a live action remake of Disney’s ‘Cinderella,’ so this isn’t an identical analog, but stay with me here, it’s close enough).

Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother was A+

Was it considered a ‘pretty big deal’ at the time? For adults, probably? Wikipedia talks extensively about race being an important factor in the making, here, so I presume so. I myself remember, believing that it was Disney’s Cinderella because that was the only version I knew existed, thinking, “Oh, Cinderella is black in this one,” and then not watching it because I was a boy and Cinderella was for girls, or whatever.

But crucially, the message being pushed at that point in U.S. history was, “Who cares what her skin color is? A black woman can be Cinderella, end of story.” And you know what? I like that message. I’m all for that message. And there’s, undoubtedly, that message going around regarding Ariel today, and that’s great.

…But there’s a different one, too. One that emphasizes that skin color matters, not that it doesn’t. This one… I don’t like so much.

Because all the people acting like the negative reaction to Ariel’s skin color is ludicrous would lose their utter fucking minds if Tiana in a live-action version of The Princess and the Frog were white. But the excuses for why Ariel can be black apply just the same — she isn’t Pocahontas, who needs to be a Native American; or Jasmine, who needs to be Middle Eastern; or Moana, who needs to be Polynesian. There is nothing about the character Tiana for which her dark skin is vital to that story or to her character. (There are a few racial undertones early in the film, but none that truly must be there in order for this young woman to kiss a cursed frog prince and get amphibianified herself and go on a charming adventure on the Louisiana bayou).

So am I fine with a black Ariel? Absolutely. But I’d also be fine with a white Tiana. And I’m aware that, should a white Tiana emerge in a ‘Princess and the Frog’ adaptation, the people supporting Black Ariel would be in a screeching, frothy-mouthed fury that the people mad at Black Ariel could never hope to match.

And so I also know that that Disney will never, ever, even consider doing it.

And that’s the thing: many people who are frustrated that Ariel has black skin are not upset that Ariel has black skin. They know Disney would never, ever dare to make Tiana white, would never have the courage to say, “Actually, her race and ethnicity aren’t that important — and gosh you seem to have some real racial hang-ups if you aren’t comfortable with this change in a fictional story about a hopeful restaurateur in New Orleans who transforms into a frog!”

The motivation of making Ariel black is that race matters, not that it doesn’t, and this is demonstrated by changing a character’s skin from white to black.

It is a different game, and people know it. And it’s okay for people to push for skin color to matter less and less in American society — the decision to make Ariel black was to make it matter more. That it definitely matters to some people is no reason to make it matter for everyone — but that’s not the stance our cultural elite has taken.

I recently came across Scott Alexander’s short story “Sort by Controversial,” about an online ad agency that creates an AI program that spits out controversial ideas perfectly designed to divide a populace. They dub these ideas “Scissor statements.” Realizing their earth-shattering potency, they call the Pentagon to notify them that they have created a super weapon. The story unfolds with the company losing control of the AI, and our protagonist realizing that many of the ideas on the machines “most schismatic” list are happening — e.g. ’A Republican Supreme Court nominee accused of committing sexual assault as a teenager’ — or, stranger, happened before the program had been created — e.g. ‘that baker who wouldn’t make a cake for a gay wedding.’ The protagonist starts to fear one of America’s enemies has a Scissor Statement generator, somehow had one decades before they invented it, and is using it. Or if, perhaps, these issues are simply doomed to arise as time unfolds.

Either way, with his list of the most divisive statements and ideas, our terrified protagonist tells us that what we’ve seen so far are ‘low potency…enough to get us enraged. Not enough to start Armageddon.’ He warns us, though, that the Big Ones are coming, and it will be apocalyptic. We lack the faculties to even predict such statements, because to every person, the right or wrongness is so deep and so true and so obvious, we don’t even realize we disagree on it.

But, possibly, someone else does. And is waiting to use it.

It’s a great story, and this idea of a “Scissor Statement” (though ‘scissor scenario’ is maybe more accurate?) is a damn useful one. Once you’ve learned the concept, it’s hard to not see how often these seem to be employed these days.

And it’s hard to not see Disney’s “Little Mermaid” as a recent manifestation of this. Because, I mean, really, who really cares if Ariel is black, right?

“If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing. It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody. At first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. Crescit eundo. You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work, they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is. Finally, they don’t care about the Scissor statement anymore. They’ve just dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you and wanting you to fail that they can’t walk it back. You’ve got to prove them wrong, not because you care about the Scissor statement either, but because otherwise they’ll do anything to poison people against you, make it impossible for them to even understand the argument for why you deserve to exist. You know this is true. Your mind becomes a constant loop of arguments you can use to defend yourself, and rehearsals of arguments for why their attacks are cruel and unfair, and the one burning question: how can you thwart them? How can you convince people not to listen to them, before they find those people and exploit their biases and turn them against you? How can you combat the superficial arguments they’re deploying, before otherwise good people get convinced, so convinced their mind will be made up and they can never be unconvinced again? How can you keep yourself safe?”

Surely, Disney knew this would be controversial. In fact, the more I look around, the more it seems that Hollywood creators are intentionally inserting things they know will be controversial into their films and television, so that the controversy can be a marketing tactic. Let’s make Ariel black; let’s put black characters into fantasy series with worlds based on medieval Europe; let’s have She-Hulk rant at Bruce Banner a list of cliché tumblr complaints. Let’s find five tweets upset about this stuff and ask the actors about it. Let’s have articles written up. Let’s make it all a big deal. Let’s film the cast talking about how important representation is! Someone will be upset. We know someone will! And, we know who that someone is! So let’s piss them off, and then use their anger to start a flame war on twitter, and really motivate Our Side to… watch She-Hulk, I guess.

Let’s make watching She-Hulk virtue.

Again and again and again, these little bombs are thrown into our culture, and our trust in each other wanes, and wanes, and wanes.

[The] Scissor was never really about other people anyway. Other people are just the trigger — and I use that word deliberately, in the trigger warning sense. Once you’re triggered, you never need to talk to anyone else again. Just the knowledge that those people are out there is enough.
Fifty percent of the population disagrees with me on the third-highest-ranked Scissor statement. I don’t know who they are. I haven’t really appreciated that fact. Not really. I can’t imagine it being anyone I know. They’re too decent. But I can’t be sure it isn’t. So I drink.

I don’t have a solution, I think. While the label is useful, I don’t think deploying it actually solves our cultural bloodbath. Pointing out that Black Ariel is a Scissor Statement becomes its own scissor statement. And to be sure, “Tiana could be white” is a Scissor Statement of my own making. (And God knows, shipping a plane of 50 immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard is a Scissor Statement).

But here’s the thing — were I in charge of Disney? I wouldn’t make Tiana white. Could I? Sure! But, I know it would piss off a bunch of people (many of whom are completely fine with a black Ariel). It would cut us up. Similarly, I wouldn’t make Ariel black. Could I? Sure! But it will piss off a bunch of people (many of whom know I would never make a white Tiana). It would cut us up.

Maybe we should just stop. Cutting each other. With scissors.

But… That’s a Scissor Statement, isn’t it?

Because maybe some people need to be cut.

Post script: Here are some other fun Scissor Statements!