Steve Crowder says it's not realistic for a Black actor to portray a mermaid
Crowder: “We're not going for the realism with a Black mermaid”
Published
Citation From the May 24, 2023, edition of Louder with Crowder, streamed on Rumble
STEVEN CROWDER (HOST): We're gonna see a nice -- nice little redhead mermaid. Okay, so -- we're not going for the realism with a Black mermaid.
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I don't care if you wanna have a Black mermaid. Who gives a -- but you have to understand the mythos, right? You have to understand the folklore of the mermaid. This is what happened, by the way, with Lord of the Rings. Just to be clear, it would be like turning -- well, not a historical figure, not Rosa Parks. Let me think of a very white person -- Tom Sawyer into a white guy. The whole point is there was a mythos of, like, when you're dealing with Lord of the Rings, they wanted folklore for sort of western European people because they didn't have it. There was Nordic folklore. There was African folklore. They said, okay. And then they said, no. Now let's make it all Black. Mermaids, this is something that if you look -- it comes from explorers, this comes from a largely western European or Spanish European, right, people who were explorers, and they would have seen mermaids. And if they would have seen that, they're like, she's drowning. Was what -- what, is Ariel gonna have floaties?
GERALD MORGAN (CO-HOST): Yeah. Not sure I follow.
CROWDER: And even the shot in the original trailer -- remember the famous Little Mermaid shot was the glorious red mane, like that -- that one. Right?
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But now, it's like a whip because they're braids. So, it's just like, smack. It doesn't work.
DARRIN CROWDER (GUEST): I didn't think it was very realistic. I don't know how a mermaid gets acrylic nails down there in the --
STEVEN CROWDER: Yeah, it's true.
MORGAN: They do have --
STEVEN CROWDER: Salt water's corrosive.
DARRIN CROWDER: : Maybe it -- maybe it helps with the swimming.