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Good question! I'm glad it's my friend who I know a little about and not a rando on twitter. Her quote surprised me because it seemed to imply that a black person happened to try out for the role and was picked on merit, just as when somebody applies for a random office job. I look at the situation and see politics in movie casting, she's assuming some poor actress did her best and is getting attacked by people looking to disqualify her on ostensibly artistic but actually racist grounds.
She's what I call a social-justice Mormon: very Mormon, but also posts lots of SJW stuff. If she sat down and thought about it, I don't think she'd be on board with the extremist smash-the-patriarchy stuff. And one of my criticisms of a lot of SJW stuff is that it obfuscates things like this -- it's happy to let her believe that the role was based on artistic and acting merit. But I think she'd be sympathetic to my white friend who's a children's book author and keeps getting discriminated against for being white.
That's why I think it's more productive to focus on the deeper principles than the pre-drawn battle lines. She could probably have a productive conversation with us about the hazards of putting politics where it doesn't belong, because she remembers at some level that her grandparents were wary of that. But when people say "artistically it's just not appropriate for Ariel the mermaid to be black" while BLM is telling her they're secretly white supremacists, well, that's a much harder sell, and we'll have to have the argument all over again when it's trans Joan of Arc.
The trouble is, people are leaping from "if you say it's not appropriate for Ariel to be black" to "then you mean it's not appropriate for any mermaid to be black", which is a whole other conversation and assumption.
If they made a new movie with a black mermaid and gave her a different name and a different costume (and that's my point about the red hair: these are the identifying elements of Ariel as created by Disney, she has red hair and dresses in blue, just as Snow White has black hair and a red ribbon, and Belle has a yellow dress - little girls are very insistent on these elements to be correct or else it's not really Ariel or Belle or Cinderella or whomever) then yeah, objecting to black mermaids could be put down to "this is racism, would you say the same thing to a black woman applying for a job?"
But it's not, this is very specifically Ariel the Mermaid, an already created character with her set iconography and years of marketing to establish her, and making her black (while retaining all the rest of the iconography, including the red hair), then it's about cash grabbing and about hopping aboard the DEI bandwagon with as much sincerity as a cannibal declaring he's vegan (because my last meal was vegan, I asked him before I cooked him and he told me he was a vegan).
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I was raised in a religious community and I marvel at how many of today's social justice advocates are literally the same people who were the nosy church ladies in decades past. Not just the same sorts of people--the same specific people. Some of them are still church ladies, too--but those who have stopped being church ladies did not ride out on a wave a new atheism. Instead they rode out on a wave of righteous indignation concerning gay marriage or some other social issue they saw their church as being "out of touch" on. Thinking through my extended family, this category covers about a third of the women, but not one man in ten.
Actually, now that I'm drawing up tallies, I'm realizing with a dull non-surprise that none of the formerly-religious men in my extended family who took up atheism in the last, oh, three decades or so have adopted any "social justice" views as a result, while far more than half of the women (a smaller absolute number) who severed ties with their churches are now extremely vocal leftists. This harmonizes with demographic reports I've seen but I'd never before sat down and really thought about it.
It's hard for me to model such a complete lack of principles without referencing the NPC meme. But the best I can manage is just that these are people who are predisposed, for whatever reason, to enforce social expectations to the best of their ability. One day they woke up and saw that the social expectation that they go to pride parades was stronger than the social expectation that they go to church potlucks, so they stopped making casseroles and started making rainbow flags. Charitably, social cohesion is just the point for them; less charitably (but maybe more accurately from an evopsych perspective), the opportunity to snub others while raising one's own status in the most powerful in-group may also be an attractive position.
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