Adapted from the book Wannabe by Aisha Harris. Copyright © 2023 by Aisha Harris. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
So it’s 2013, I’m 25 years old, and I’ve been at Slate for a little under two years. It’s around the holidays, and I’d been thinking about how Santa Claus’ race had been a sticking point for me as a kid. The reasons my dad gave me why Santa was Black at home but white pretty much everywhere else I looked seemed like bunk. (He was a shape-shifter, my dad said, who took on the race of whatever household he was visiting. Clever, but I wasn’t buying it.) It seemed outdated for Santa to still be depicted in most places as a fat old white dude. So I wondered, what if instead of representing him as a human, we just avoided race and made him some other kind of creature? And what other creature would be more perfect, more beloved—the kind of creature everyone, everywhere could get behind, no problem—than a penguin?
It was an instant hit in the room. I wrote the piece, making my case lightheartedly while noting the real bias embedded in our culture’s white-as-default approach to everything, but especially fictional characters. Someone on the art team created a fun cartoon image of a fat penguin dressed up in a Santa outfit bearing gifts.
The piece went out into the world in December, and while I expected some pushback—because when you work at Slate, you’re basically inviting pushback anytime you publish anything—I thought it’d come and go after a day or two like most stories do.
And then Megyn Kelly got involved:
Yet another person claiming it’s racist to have a white Santa, and—by the way for all you kids watching at home: Santa just is white, but this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a Black Santa. But you know, Santa is what he is, and just so you know, we’re just debating this ’cause someone wrote about it, kids.
On her Fox News show The Kelly File, Megyn Kelly’s producers corralled a panel of Fox contributors and commentators to bring my piece “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore” to the attention of the world. To be fair to the spirit of the mostly ridiculous discussion that took place, two of the panelists, Jedediah Bila and Bernard Whitman, defended my perspective (“our social fabric can take the elasticity of Kris Kringle,” the latter said) and seemed to take it all as lightheartedly as I had in my article.
But no one remembers that part, and for good reason. Kelly (and less famously, the other panelist among them, Monica Crowley) was palpably incensed by what I’d written, as if she were a small child who’d just been told that not only was Santa not real, but the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny were also fakes. She said I’d gone “off the rails” in suggesting Santa Penguin, and insisted, with not even a modicum of irony, that “just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change.”
Oh yeah, and then she added: “Jesus was a white man, too.”
I was not watching live when that three-minute segment aired, because I like myself too much and that’s not something I do except for the rare occasion when my work requires me to do so. But it didn’t take long to feel the debris falling my way as the thing detonated all over the internet that night. What follows next is my particular experience alone, but the gist of this sequence is probably fairly typical of what goes down for any journalist who suddenly goes viral:
1. First, the general public reacts. I was at a Brooklyn Nets game at the time, and suddenly I was getting messages from friends and colleagues excitedly sharing the news of what had transpired. I wasn’t much of a Twitter person at that point yet (God, what a time), but when I went to check my page, I saw that the praise and, more acutely, the vitriol were gushing forth. Pretty standard stuff when you’re a Black woman—name-calling, racist and misogynistic slurs (“n——,” “bitch,” and the twofer, “n—–bitch”).
2. Almost simultaneously, the outlets and online commentators react. In my case, Kelly’s rant was blogged about by seemingly every major news outlet and then some, the greatest hits from the segment being the factory-made quotes “Santa just is white” and “Jesus was a white man, too.” The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report each did a segment on it, as did The Rachel Maddow Show.
3. At this point, the story has grown beyond your wildest dreams (nightmares?) and you feel as though you have to respond to the hubbub in some way. The day after The Kelly File segment aired, I wrote another piece, this one headlined “What Fox News Doesn’t Understand About Santa.”
4. While that’s happening, you’re probably fielding interview requests from some of those same outlets. In just a matter of days, I did the biggest number of public appearances I’ve ever done for a single piece I’ve written, including All In with Chris Hayes, The Today Show, Reliable Sources, and NPR’s Tell Me More.
5. Occasionally in these instances, the furor gets so heated (or the news cycle is so slow, as it usually is as Christmas approaches) that you transcend the industry news cycle and bleed into mainstream culture, too. In my case, Kelly’s rant made it as far as Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment, where Kenan Thompson, dressed as Santa, revealed: “You heard of Secret Santa? Well, here’s a secret for you: I’m Black as hell.”
What would normally be a one-, maybe two-day news story stretched out over the course of about a week—a week of nonstop interview requests and emails from people I hadn’t spoken to in years reaching out to say they’d been following the controversy. My colleagues and bosses were thrilled; my family and friends were ecstatic and proud. And why wouldn’t they be? This moment gave me the kind of publicity many people dream of and spend an inordinate amount of time and effort attempting to manufacture—all because I said I wanted Santa Claus to be a penguin. This was an unqualified win.
I hated nearly every moment of it.
After I politely turned down a request from Don Lemon’s show a few days into the cycle, the producer replied: “Thanks for reaching back, Aisha. Are you just a little ‘over’ the story?”
My canned response: “I’m genuinely surprised at how much attention this continues to get but definitely glad that it sparked a discussion about how our culture is represented.” I left it at that.
A decade later, I’m more than exhausted by the ongoing discussion about cultural representation. Because frankly, it feels like déjà vu. An ongoing and particularly ridiculous example: Disney’s remake of The Little Mermaid, which has the young Black singer Halle Bailey stepping into the fins of Ariel.
As it happens, my first pop-culture obsession was The Little Mermaid. I was drawn to everything about it: Sebastian’s literal and figurative crabbiness, Flounder’s flightiness, Ursula’s seduction. But more than anything, I wanted to be Ariel, with or without the fins. The bright red hair, the clamshell bra, the handsome prince: By the time I was 3 or 4, I was already fully locked in, longing to be a Disney princess.
More to the point, I desperately wanted an Ariel doll. But there were no white dolls in our house, and that was deliberate—my dad, as the Santa article mentioned, was very aware of the infamous doll tests that had been conducted by psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark in the 1940s, which found that in a study of more than 200 Black kids between the ages of 3 and 7 years old, the majority assigned positive traits to white dolls and negative traits to Black ones. That study became a crucial component in the Brown v. Board of Education case on school desegregation. I was never going to own an Ariel doll.
Now, Black Ariel dolls are available wherever toys are sold for $26.99. And that makes some people very, very angry.
In fact, the new Little Mermaid’s detractors just might take the cake for having the most absurdist takes this discourse has ever seen. “From a scientific perspective, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean,” political commentator Matt Walsh opined on “science” of the mythical mermaid creatures. “I mean, if anything, not only should the Little Mermaid be pale, she should actually be translucent. If you look at deep sea creatures, they’re, like, translucent. They have no kind of pigmentation whatsoever.”
Not as pithy as “Santa just is white,” but you’ve got to hand it to him for that Olympian-grade execution of mental gymnastics. That man’s mind is so twisted as to have him convinced he’d rather watch a jellyfish-colored half-human than a Black half-human fall in love with a prince for two hours.
It’s all gotten so predictable some studios are now warning their minority stars to be prepared for the worst, as if any performer of color could be surprised to receive racial harassment. “It was something that Lucasfilm actually got in front of,” said Moses Ingram, star of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who faced her own bizarre backlash for appearing on the show. “[They said to us], ‘This is a thing that, unfortunately, likely will happen. But we are here to help you; you can let us know when it happens.’ ”
I can empathize. Never in my life had I been called a n—— more times than in the aftermath of Santa Penguin. I stayed off Twitter for a while and vowed never to read the comments under my own articles ever again. (I’ve mostly kept that promise to myself, and my mind is better for it.) But my inbox was harder to avoid. For every encouraging, friendly, and sweet email I received from people far and wide (Brazil, Nigeria, Belgium, etc.), there was a soul-sucking message from a willfully ignorant racist to counter it and try to knock me down a peg. I deleted most of them, including the handful of death threats, because I don’t really need that kind of energy clogging up my inbox.
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But while I can brush these people off as miserable and pathetic, I can’t help but be filled with dread over the fact that such people aren’t really outliers, or at the very least, they don’t seem like outliers. They are loud and wrong and proud, and their collective voice can’t just be tuned out easily.
These people cling to the purity of myths and legends, which are inherently meant to be fluid, malleable, revised, bent, and subverted through subsequent interpretations. Part of the issue stems from the fact that, no matter how many times or ways a piece of art is appropriated, there will always emerge a dominant version (or versions) of that art. When it comes to narrative storytelling, the versions that tend to prevail are white.
This is especially true when it comes to anything Disney-related. By nature of its near-monopoly on children’s entertainment—and now all-ages entertainment, thanks to owning Marvel, Fox, and so much in between—the images the company has created loom large. “The Disney version becomes the definitive version,” animator Glen Keane once said. Which partially explains why Disney keeps creating so-called “live action” (CGI) remakes of its previous animated successes. Audiences like what is familiar, and that includes the physical appearances of their favorite heroes and villains. It makes me wonder: Disney may have reimagined Ariel as a Black girl with red locks for its blatant cash grab of a remake, but if a little kid visits one of the conglomerate’s theme parks, will they greet an Ariel who looks like the blue-eyed 1989 version—or the 2023 version?
Today, Black kids have more characters to choose from than ever before, so it’s moving (and heartbreaking) to watch viral videos of parents recording their Black children as they laid eyes upon Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid.
“She’s Black?” says one girl. “Yay!”
“She’s brown like me!” exclaims another.
The joy, the recognition, the kinship these kids are finding in this new version of the character makes me so happy for them, but also a little bit sad for my younger self, who didn’t get to have this experience.
While writing the Santa piece, I’d emailed my dad asking him to send me a column he’d written for our local paper, the New Haven Register, when I was just shy of 3 years old, titled “Black Kids Need a Black Santa.” In some ways, my article echoed his own, though his was from the perspective of a father imagining a more inclusive world for his daughter. He wrote about wanting to make sure I grew up with a “healthy image” of myself: “I do not want her to become one of those statistics that show Black children preferring white dolls to the dolls that look like them.”
Yet I still wound up wishing I had Ariel’s red hair and clamshell bra and longing for an Ariel doll I could call my own. If only that little girl knew what awaited her 30 years later.
