#elsie's memory supremacy

[yourreddancer]

J Bernard Jones The reason why The Little Mermaid casting has triggered so many (mostly) white people (the ones who are outraged) is that, beyond the garden variety recent racism that has plagued Black actors from Star Wars to Captain America to The Rings of Power to House of the Dragon, is simple: it’s their deep down fear of replacement. That’s right: replacement theory. On steroids. And the actual reason this particular casting has sent them over the rails is, beyond any other, in their mind it is a violation of America’s most treasured symbol of purity: the white woman. Literally replaced by a Black woman. 

Nevermind that Disney’s beloved 1989  “The Little Mermaid” is a cartoon. Nevermind that mermaids aren’t real. Nevermind that in the original Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Little Mermaid is green and basically dies in the end after being treated like an annoying pet by the prince (spoiler alert).  None of that matters to these folks whose least concern is whether or not Ms. Bailey is actually good or can sing as much as their Yosemite Sam foot stomping (wrong studio!) that Ariel must be a white woman since they apparently believe the ‘89 cartoon is a Ken Burns documentary.

There is historical context for all of this unhinged mass hysteria over a made up fish girl and the Black actress chosen to portray her. Epigenetic memory does not just exist in the souls of Black folk. The Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow are our crosses. Epigenetic memory exists in the cells of many white people, too: having dominion over black people, white supremacy and anti-blackness itself dwells deeply within, literally imprinted on their eyeballs in the very first official blockbuster, 1915’s smash hit ultra-revisionist, ultra-racist “Birth of a Nation.”

That film, originally titled “The Clansman”— to this day admired as much for its pioneering technical achievements and epic scope as it is criticized for its valorization of the Ku Klux Klan as heroes saving American society from the unfettered savagery of its made up out of control Blacks — formed the modern foundation for many core American stereotypes that endure to this day. And none of those stereotypes are more potent than that of The White Woman as the epitome of virtuous purity, the delicate flower whose innocence must be protected at all costs. In fact, in DW Griffith’s immortal film, that cost is extraordinarily high: the young heroine Elsie (played by Lillian Gish, America’s Sweetheart superstar no less) commits suicide rather than be raped by a vicious Black man (a cartoonish white actor in blackface), reinforcing and ingraining the stereotype that all Black men are dangerous, potential threats to white women from then until now.

Yet Elsie wasn’t just saving herself from the film’s Black rapist. She was saving herself from that film’s version of “blackness” itself. In the film, the freed ex-slaves are portrayed as lazy, out-of-control savages; they are cast in the role of destroyers of society, law & order, and are a literal threat to the survival of the white race. Elsie’s suicide was not simply to avoid having her white womanhood defiled by sexual assault by Griffith’s Black brute stereotype, but from the not thinly veiled “threat” of being impregnated.

Even then white audiences, who loved the film, understood it’s plain meaning:“they” will not replace us. And they made it plain by engaging in a series of race riots and massacres of Black people in many areas in the immediate aftermath of showings of the movie. Fast forward. 

Ariel, the little mermaid, isn’t real. She’s a character: a friggin’ mermaid. But catch this: Elsie wasn’t real, either. What both of these characters share is the idea of them: pure and true and virtuous. If Elsie was the prototype of the idealized myth of white womanhood, Disney’s first Ariel is that mythology’s idealized realization.

Animation requires a specific kind of suspension of disbelief. It allows us to “purely” imprint our ideas about who a character is and what the canonical version of that character should be, absent the physical presence of an actor to distract us: other than their voice — itself a powerful instrument —  we are able to absorb the “purest” version of the character both as intended and in our own imaginations. And in some cases as reflections of ourselves or at least what we think of ourselves, especially as kids and impressionable youth. That’s what we really mean when we say “They’ve destroyed my childhood!” when we feel the favorites of our youth have been altered, disrespected, or reimagined.

Out of the many, many reports of racist vitriol directed at Disney and this new film version — not solely by white people but also some Latinos & Hispanics and even a few Blacks (un-shockingly, Black dudes from the incel-ish manosphere) —this one strikes a more primal nerve than the rest. This hatred is not merely their version of the other “moving into the neighborhood and bringing the property values down” whenever a Black actor, woman, or gay person inhabits a role in their favorite sacred franchise. This time, as they see it, it is literal replacement theory come to celluloid life as if they can’t rent or buy the precious 1989 version that Disney will happily take their money for a 33 year-old film.The racist backlash against Halle Bailey’s casting is rooted in this foundational notion of a white supremacist fantasy of The IDEA of The Virtous White Woman being upended.

In fact, the most striking aspect of the racist reactions is that these people have no other recourse than to fall back on stereotypes and racist imagery going back to Griffith’s film: memes and Photoshopped Mammy-versions of Ariel are circulating aplenty, one egregious example with gargantuan lips and her riding atop a watermelon. “Woke” is being slung around as a synonym for the n-word with Klan-like abandon. The settings on their virtual tiki torches have been turned up to 11. It doesn’t matter how many bots are involved or if real people make up the majority of vitriol. At the heart of this madness is not merely hatred and not necessarily fear. Instead it’s the realization that the thread of one of the rugs of their own self-mythology has been yanked out from under them and they are unraveling as a consequence.

Black women, as much or even more so than Black men, have always represented an existential threat to the Confederate adjacent. Ms. Bailey, as she emerges from the shadows in the trailer, is that Black woman. The threat. The replacement. And many of these miscreants are deathly afraid that if their little cherubs fall in love with a beautiful mermaid played by a real Black actress with an angelic voice the way they did with the white cartoon version, their worst fears about ”critical race theory” will come true and, in their minds, be their undoing. The beginning of their end. If that is the case, in some ways even if this version of The Little Mermaid turns out to be a bad remake, it will most definitely be worth the price of admission.

[transracialqueer]

Huxley’s adoption story is part of a much larger narrative about race, disability and abuse

by Lydia X. Z. Brown

As an autistic adult who is also a transracial, transnational adoptee from China, I am fucking infuriated and disgusted, but entirely unsurprised.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the YouTube influencers who made international news for abandoning their autistic child after adopting him from China almost three years ago.

Huxley, originally adopted by the Stauffers, is one of thousands of children, many children of colour in the Global South who are adopted each year by predominantly white families in the Global North. Since his adoption – which was documented for YouTube in meticulous detail, including the fact that Huxley was disabled, the Stauffers have filmed numerous videos of him for their YouTube channel that they monetised and gained major corporate sponsors for producing. They filmed and posted videos that showed Huxley having meltdowns, which are terrifying, vulnerable moments. They are extremely emotionally, cognitively and physically draining for autistic people. They filmed and posted videos that showed Huxley with duct tape on his hands because his mother wanted to stop him from sucking his thumb. All of this is painfully familiar for autistic people, who routinely see nonautistic parents of autistic children exploiting and monetising their children for internet fame with no regard for their children’s autonomy, dignity, or privacy.

The Stauffers, who also talked about wanting to adopt another child from Uganda or Ethiopia, horrifically decided that because Huxley turned out to have more disabilities than they realised when adopting him and was doing things that they found scary (never specified as to what precisely), they needed to find somewhere else for him to live.

Describing this process as “rehoming” Huxley to a “new forever family” – descriptions most often found in discussions of rescued dogs – only reinforces the kind of ableist dehumanisation that autistic and other disabled people commonly face. I love dogs and cats. But I also know as a person of colour that white supremacy has long deployed animalistic comparisons as a means of dehumanising black, Native, Latinx and Asian people, while also implicitly or explicitly devaluing our lives as less important than that of non-human animals. (One need only to look toward the white liberals who are far more outraged about a white woman choking her dog than that she brazenly threatened a black man with death). Yet despite the Stauffers’ claim that they made a careful, reasoned choice, they were, in reality, participating in a less overtly awful part of a vast, unregulated and shadowy world of human trafficking poorly disguised as attempts to find new loving homes for adopted children – often disabled adoptees of colour – who are ultimately treated as expendable and disposable.

And yet, at the same time, many of us in disabled community are actually minorly relieved that the Stauffers abandoned their child and sent him to a different family because at least they didn’t murder him. Before you ask whether I’m hyperbolising or sensationalising, let me point you to the list of names maintained on the Disability Memorial website – a list of disabled people who were murdered by family members or caregivers that we read at yearly vigils. A list of disabled people whose lives were deemed tragic rather than their murders, whose murderers were lauded and praised as heroes, martyrs, angels, or saints, for taking on the great burden of dealing with us only to understandably snap from all of that stress. A list of disabled people murdered in calculated, cruel, horrific ways, as well as by deliberate neglect and years-long abuse. A list that has grown so long since the first vigils held in 2012 that this year, vigil organisers stopped reading the whole thing, because it would have taken hours just to say the names. The bar we have for these parents is so goddamn low now.

When I was still a baby, I became one of 787 children adopted that year from China by families in the United States. Like thousands of other transracial and transnational adoptees – children adopted by families of different races and nations than their own – I grew up with a fractured relationship to my own heritage and culture of origin, unable to access the same type of multigenerational and ancestral wisdom and knowledge as people raised by families and in communities who share their culture and history. And like many other disabled, queer and trans people, I also grew up in a family where I was the only one of my kind. Transracial adoptees, disabled people, queer people and trans people often share a particularly pernicious experience of isolation and alienation, a permanent outsider status or liminal existence, where we never fully belong anywhere. We are unmoored, marked indelibly by trauma made ordinary, our lives and experiences constantly subject to exploitation by those with more power and resources – even to the point of erasing our very existence.

Huxley’s story – no matter how much the Stauffers cried in their video describing what happened – also lays bare what many of us adoptees already know. The adoption industry – in both domestic and transnational adoption – is fueled by global white supremacy in the guise of white saviourism and it’s grotesquely ableist and capitalist. Dominant narratives about transracial and transnational adoption portray children of colour in the Global South as helpless and malleable infants who need to be rescued or saved by white people in the Global North, who will give us “a better life” because our own communities and cultures are presumed backward, uncivilised, uneducated and wrong. This logic is not only colonising and often orientalist but also profoundly ableist on a civilisational scale, by positing that white-dominant and Global North societies are superior to those of negatively racialised people in the Global South.

Transracial and transnational adoption often functions as little more than a less obviously awful form of human trafficking designed to serve colonial interests – and indeed, even domestic adoptions have a long history of eugenicist and racist aims through the use of residential schools and spurious labels of mental defectiveness, promiscuity and criminality to declare black, Indigenous and other people of colour as unfit to parent. That history continues today as state authorities frequently work to deprive black and Indigenous disabled parents of their children while simultaneously prohibiting many black, Indigenous and disabled parents from ever adopting children.

My heart breaks for Huxley, because I could have been him. And we know that untold numbers of other disabled adoptees remain at risk not only for another abandonment, but for further abuse, exploitation, or even murder – after all, that’s what happened to Zha-Nae, Sherin, Sabrina, Kentae, Nicholas, Jeffrey, Brandon, Grace, Mirudula, Elsie, La’Marion, Courtney, Madoc Hyeonsu, Terrilynn, Shane, Mollie, Noah and undoubtedly many more we will never know. There is no easy policy solution to the problems endemic in the child “welfare” system, let alone the underlying conditions of deliberate impoverishment, deprivation and dehumanisation of negatively racialised and disabled people that feed these systems. But those who are impacted are desperate for hope that Huxley might have some chance to live through this new trauma – that perhaps one day he will find community and belonging.

(Link in the notes)