But this is the worst of what happens to us as a result of our hair colour. We might, in the UK, face a bit of stick, born perhaps of an anti-Celtic sentiment, and the sort of nasty sexualisation all women sadly face. Halle Bailey, who will play Ariel in the new Disney live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. Also, to further confound the racists, mixed-race model Adwoa Aboah has auburn hair that grows into what she calls “a ginger afro”. Look at the legion ginger women we have in the public eye, from Angela Rayner and Lily Cole to Julianne Moore and Karen Gillan. But more representation for ginger women isn’t going to fix that. I don’t doubt that young ginger women continue to be sexualised in the same way. I still carry emotional scars from years of boys calling me names such as “ginger mooey” and “tango bollocks”, and of being frequently asked about the colour of my pubes. Now I’m grown up and the teasing has slowed. I certainly felt an affinity with Ariel when I was younger, and it felt good growing up to know that, no matter how frequently my gingerness was mocked, I had a Spice Girl and a Disney character on my side. Others are of the mindset that Ariel was a wonderful role model for young ginger girls, and this casting is a loss for them. On that basis, well, black goes with anything. Disney’s creators used Italian-American Alyssa Milano’s face as a template for Ariel, bunged on some blue eyes, and turned her hair red simply because, the story goes, blonde hair would be too similar to Daryl Hannah’s in 1984’s Splash, and red complements a green tail. While it’s fair to say Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid probably wasn’t black in his original story, the narrative features the mermaid killing herself in order to achieve moral purity, so tweaking his version has always been necessary.
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