“I was born in 1990 and media taught girls that the most important thing for us to be was pretty,” Cameron-Gordon says. “It also taught me that in order to be pretty I needed to be skinny, white, with blue eyes and blonde hair. I remember crying in the mirror because I did not like what I saw. I can’t even begin to describe how much I healed through the process of writing this book.
“Literature is one of the first places a child looks to find role models — the people they want to be like,” Cameron-Gordon continues. “I can’t stress enough how important it is for children to see darker complexioned characters in books.”
It turns out Cameron-Gordon was hardly alone in thinking it was well past time for kids to see a Black mermaid: When she started writing The Mermaid Princesses, she had no way of knowing that her book would end up getting released just two months before Disney’s live action version of The Little Mermaid. The movie, starring Halle Bailey as Ariel, caused a stir on social media with its first trailer in 2022, as Black families around the country filmed their daughters reacting to the sight of Ariel. The heartwarming clips quickly went viral.
Cameron-Gordon has already seen little girls react to her book in a similar way.
“When I self-published my book, parents sent me videos of their children seeing The Mermaid Princesses for the first time, and it was the most touching thing,” she says. “I had two different parents share with me that their kids saw my characters on their parent’s Instagram and grabbed the phone and said: ‘Mommy, she looks like me!’”
Cameron-Gordon can’t help but feel the close timing of The Mermaid Princesses and The Little Mermaid is serendipitous.
“I will always remember the night I found out that Disney was casting a Black girl for the role of Ariel,” the author says. “My godmother…
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