I have an affinity for everything aquatic—aquariums, marine life, the beach, you name it—so growing up, my favorite Disney princess was Ariel. While I loved the character, the animation, and, really, just everything about her, I was aware that I didn’t look like her. This wasn’t necessarily painful for me. It was just something I was aware of, even though I didn’t completely understand what it really meant.

The Disney princesses were formative for me. Watching Snow White is one of my earliest memories. Beauty and the Beast is partly responsible for inspiring my love of books, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were obvious staples—and they were all white. This fact didn’t make me love these princesses any less, but it did put me at a disadvantage—one I noticed early on.

My first trip to Disneyland was as magical as they advertise, but I wasn’t prepared to see other little girls dressed up as the princesses I loved. I was shocked, excited, and a little sad because I knew even then I couldn’t join them. At some point, my parents bought me my own princess shoes and hair accessories, but they never bought me a princess dress. To be honest, I don’t think I ever asked for one. And I think, looking back, the reason was that I knew I didn’t look like these girls, and they didn’t look like me, and so putting my brown-skinned, curly-headed self in Belle’s dress or Ariel’s seashells just…didn’t make sense. 

Again, these weren’t fully-formed conscious thoughts I had as a child. They were just things I inherently internalized. As I got older my thoughts were validated and confirmed. Classmates would get on the case of other children who dared dress up as a character that wasn’t canonically of color and ding them for inaccuracy. Never mind that we were just playing dress-up and make-believe. Never mind that none of this mattered in the real world.

I grew up policed by my peers, and so I policed myself in ways that didn’t matter at all. I had such an elementary understanding of this policing, but it colored my life. I was thinking in simple terms: Ariel and Belle and Aurora don’t look like me, so they are not me and I could not be them. But Pocahontas? Well, it’s embarrassing to admit now but as a child, I thought she was the Black princess because she had darker skin. I don’t know that I had a concept of “Black” as a kid, but I saw that I was brown and she was brown, and so we must be the same in those simple terms. Add in that I had a lot of long hair as a kid that, when straightened, was as long and thick as Pocahontas’appeared to be, and it all made sense.

Pocahontas was the brown-skinned princess. She was for me. I was her and could be her. I never said this aloud, but it made sense in my head and my heart. But obviously, that didn’t and couldn’t last. One of my first clues was the line in “Colors of the Wind” when she sings “…for whether we have white or copper skin…” I had never been called copper. I didn’t make the leap to “she is actually not you” from that alone, but it did give me pause. In the midst of feeling seen, it made me wonder.

I was in high school when the first Black princess really did come along, and by then I wasn’t looking to be seen in a Disney movie. Tiana meant—and means—a lot to me, but her impact is so different from what it could have been when I was a little girl looking for herself in her favorite movies. I have wondered what it would have been like to grow up with Tiana, to know without a doubt that she was like me, I was like her, and that I could be her. Would my parents have dressed me in her costume when we went to Disneyland? Would I have worn my hair like hers and forgone straightening it for so many years? How would I be different now if I had been seen then?

This brings me to today and the fact that a new Ariel is on the horizon and she’s played by Halle Bailey, a beautiful Black actress. And, reader, I see me. Little girls do, too. They’re noticing that she is like them, and it’s making them feel beautiful and seen. It’s also attracting from critics who feel the world is growing too “woke.” Seeing these reactions has hurt my heart. But if skin color doesn’t matter (as some argue), then why can’t Ariel be Black? When I come to the end of these thoughts, there’s something poetic about my favorite princess now being represented as a Black woman. This would have completely blown my mind as a child. I would’ve known then that there was a princess who reflected me. I wouldn’t have had to search for similarities and come to wrong conclusions.

And no, maybe Black Ariel wouldn’t have changed my life, but she would have meant the world.

How do you feel about representation—is it arrant wokeness, or something more?