Colorblind Casting

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A photo of the cast of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, which featured a colorblind cast. The photo was sourced from a People article.

A movie that features colorblind casting is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. As mentioned before, they didn’t tie familiar relationships with race so each family member is very individualistic. While this isn’t the first or the last movie to incorporate colorblind casting, it is one of the first that comes to most people’s minds when it is brought up.

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A photo of Ariel's sisters from the live-action Little Mermaid. The photo was sourced from a YouLoveIt article.

Another movie that features colorblind casting. In the photo, you can see Ariel in the middle with her sisters surrounding her. All of her sisters vary in race and nationality which was not a part of the original source material, but instead adapted when made into live-action. I will be going into more detail about this movie, but more regarding Halle Bailey and her character specifically.

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A tweet about Princess Tiana. The author of the tweet is twitter user @/tradfeminine.

In this tweet I found the twitter author @/tradfeminine says that people would be upset if Tiana was changed from being black to white. This tweet was in response to a tweet from Disney revealing the trailer for the new Little Mermaid movie. In the tweet, we can see something called the false equivalence fallacy. False equivalence fallacy is a fallacy where someone tries to equate two unrelated and un-equivalent things. The Twitter author falsely claims that changing Tiana’s race from black to white is equal to changing Ariel’s race from white to black, but fails to consider how important race is in regard to each individual story. Tiana being a young black woman in the movie The Princess and the Frog is extremely important and makes up most of her backstory and explains why she is enduring the hardships thrown her way, while Ariel’s race is not important to her story. So, to fix the invalid argument, I would say the equivalent of changing Tiana’s race would be equal to making Ariel human, as in the entire story would be flipped upside down and changed.