BLACK ANNABETH IS REAL
Spelling out what seeing Black girls in leading roles on screen means to me.
Content warning: The following newsletter includes vague mentions of anti-Black racism and misogynoir, as well as minor spoilers for Percy Jackson & The Olympians (if, for some reason, you haven’t read the books yet).
My dearest friends,
I’m typing this newsletter through tears. Real tears. The kind that I haven’t cried in a very long time. Yesterday, Rick Riordan, author of legendary, childhood-defining Percy Jackson & The Olympians (PJO), announced on his blog the final casting for the main trio of the Disney+ TV adaptation of his middle-grade book series. It’s been incredibly exciting for long-term PJO fans (myself included) to see how involved Rick has been in the making of this TV show given how limits imposed on his involvement in the previous attempt at a page-to-screen translation of the series has been notoriously disastrous and poorly received by both author and readers/viewers alike (#JusticeForLoganLerman!!!).
So, back to the upcoming adaptation: fans had known since last month that newcomer Walker Scobell (The Adam Project) had been cast as the series title character, Percy Jackson. However, we had yet to find out about the actors who would have the privilege to embody the trio’s other two characters. There had been whispers and wishes (desperate, desperate, wishes… and doubts) that those two actors would be Black or brown, but nothing was confirmed – until a little over 24 hours ago, when the major news dropped: Annabeth Chase will be played by Leah Sava Jeffries (Empire, Rel, Beast, Something from Tiffany), and Grover Underwood will be played by Aryan Simhadri (Cheaper by the Dozen, Spin).
The stars of the main trio. From left to right: Leah Sava Jeffries, Walker Scobell, and Aryan Simhadri (Source: Disney).
*SCREAMS* It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that this news felt like my biggest dreams come true. I gasped, I laughed, I yelled, I sobbed… I was (and still am) happy about and understood the significance of Grover being played by a brown, Indian American teenager. But more importantly #ToMe, the Annabeth announcement… It felt like a warm, comforting hug – and a victory – to my thirteen-year-old self. Hell, it feels like that to my current self. Just a few years ago, I was in the trenches of PJO Tumblr fighting for the legitimacy of racialized depictions of these three characters (but mainly Percy and Annabeth) and other of my faves in fanart and fancasts. Around the same time, many of us witnessed how (primarily white) people viciously and nastily reacted to African American singer and actress Halle Bailey being cast in the role of Ariel for Disney’s live action The Little Mermaid (remember #NotMyAriel?). And now, you’re telling me that Annabeth Chase, Daughter of Athena aka the Greek Goddess of Wisdom, smartest person in the room, nicknamed Wise Girl, love interest to the main character, is canonically Black? Yeah, maybe you might understand now why this made me cry (and clearly, I’m not the only person excited about this – #PercyJackson was the number one trending hashtag on Twitter yesterday, with #Annabeth and #Grover trending as well). VINDICATION!!! WE WON!!!
Live footage of me reacting to the casting news.
Sharing the news with the other Black women and girls in my life reinforced my sense that it was a moment worth celebrating: my mom, sister, cousin, and friends were all very enthusiastic about this casting, too. We were all in various levels of shock, from pleasant surprise to utter disbelief (the good kind). Those reactions reminded me of a speech on diversity in the media that I wrote for my 11th grade English class, in 2016. Below is a slightly edited version of that speech:
A few years ago, my little sister came to me and said, “Attou, I want my skin to be lighter. I want to be light-skinned, and I want to be pretty like Barbie.” My sister was four years old when she told me that.
This story of mine illustrates how harmful the lack of diversity, ethnic or otherwise, in the entertainment industry can be. Although the situation has improved in the past few decades, it remains to this day very problematic.
To prove my point, let’s take a look at the film and television industry: for too long, there has been an undeniable systematic bias in favour of white actors and actresses. For example, according to a 2014 study titled The Latino Media Gap: A Report on the State of Latinos in U.S. Media, Latinos represent roughly 17 percent of the American population, but appear as less than two percent of characters in films and TV shows, unlike Caucasians who represent the majority of characters on those same platforms. There are many explanations to that enormous gap, including the following: in our minds, white is the default skin colour. Just think about it: whenever you read a book and a character’s race is not specified, how do you picture them?
Too often, this default-white mindset leads to Caucasian actors being preferred to non-Whites in leading roles. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that white actors don’t deserve their success; but they shouldn’t earn it at the expense of their minority counterparts.
[…]
It is unfair that actors from minority backgrounds are less likely to be successful than their more privileged counterparts. It is unfair that some children don’t get to see themselves in their favourite characters. It is unfair that 3-year-old Samara Muir, a little Indigenous girl who dressed up as Elsa for an event, was left in tears by a grown woman and her two daughters who told her that she couldn’t wear the Frozen heroine’s costume because “Queen Elsa isn’t Black,” because “Black is ugly.”
[…]
In an ideal world, characters and casts would reflect the diversity in our population. Portrayals of people of colour and other minorities would be accurate and would not perpetuate stereotypes.
And to those of you who are thinking, “But those characters have no reason to be Black, or Asian, or Indigenous, or disabled, or gay,” I’m asking you, do people in real life have a reason to be? Do you go up to every person of colour you see and ask them why their skin is that colour? It’s just the way things are, and I think it’s important that works of fiction reflect that diversity. African American actress Viola Davis once said, “People of colour are part of the human experience, too. Art has got to reflect life, or else it’s not art. It’s commerce.”
Besides, think about that little deaf boy whose eyes lit up when he found out that Hawkeye, one of Marvel’s superheroes, uses hearing aids just like him. Think about how happy that young Black woman felt when she discovered that someone like her was cast as Hermione Granger in the newest Harry Potter play.
Nothing is more heart-warming than seeing a child who has felt marginalized for so long finally recognize themself in the protagonist of their favourite stories. The more diverse TV shows and movies become, the more this scenario will take place, and the more the entertainment industry will reflect our reality. It’s time for television in full colour.
As Viola Davis stated in her Emmy-Award acceptance speech, “The only thing that separates women of colour [or minorities in general] from anyone else is opportunity.” So, let’s show writers and producers that diverse TV series and movies will sell, that we will watch them. Let’s inform ourselves on the issue of diversity and discuss it with others, let’s go on social media and criticize writers and producers who condone whitewashing, let’s get minority actors the recognition they deserve. Let’s get minority children the heroes they deserve. Thank you.
Looking back, that speech was corny as hellllllll! It reads as an uncritical overstatement of the importance of “minority” representation in fiction, written in a cringey wannabe-inspirational tone (but I guess it worked because I got full marks for the assignment!). I am more aware now of the pitfalls of representational politics, of the fact that the visibility of marginalized communities in TV and film cannot substitute real, substantial change needed for material racial justice. Plus, there isn’t always an ulterior motive for a character being of a particular race; sometimes, it’s simply not that deep. But two things can be true at once, and representation in children’s media does matter, including in the building of a racially just world. This is something I wrote a bit about in an assignment I submitted for the Critical Race Theory (CRT) seminar I took in the winter of 2021:
Children’s media, like all media, carries many subliminal messages. It influences both how white children view racialized people and how racialized children view themselves. This explains the importance of teaching children about racial histories at a young age, as was previously discussed in our class.
Furthermore, narrative is central to CRT. Animation as a medium allows one to push the boundaries of imagination, and imagination is an essential element of liberatory projects because it allows us to rethink our current world and begin the process of building one that transcends the structures – including legal structures – through which racial and other forms of discrimination are brought into existence.
Law does not exist in a vacuum; it exists in racial, social, political, historical, and cultural contexts. Representations in cultural imagery are central in the reproduction of racial and gender hierarchy. Invisibility (as well as hypervisibility in a negative light) reinforces minority status.
Racialized representations onscreen force us to think about race in the real world, a necessary exercise to enshrine racial justice in law. […]
In sum, our design of the law and legal structures is contingent on the experiences to which we assign value. Cultural representations like those in The Little Mermaid inform our collective understanding of whose stories matter.
Annabeth, a major character in a several-million-dollar budget TV series, being a Black girl shows that stories that center our experiences matter, that they are worth telling (and I’m not even touching on what this means for Leah’s burgeoning career!). If the makers of the show do this right, Annabeth’s blackness has the potential to add so many layers to her characterization. For instance, instead of her intelligence simply being a challenge to the “dumb blonde” stereotype – a claim which has continuously been used by those who insist on her being portrayed solely as white –, Annabeth can be a testament to the fact that Black girls, including those with ADHD and dyslexia, can be smart, too. (It’s worth mentioning that learning disabilities are underdiagnosed among girls, and even more so among Black girls, so this kind of visibility in a mass-distributed TV series is a pretty huge deal.) Additionally, in the PJO books, we learn that Annabeth ran away at age seven because, being a demigod, she constantly attracted monsters, and her stepmother came to blame and resent her for putting their family in danger. Essentially, Annabeth was robbed of her childhood, forced to grow up too soon. That might aptly reflect the experiences of Black girls who are subjected to adultification, defined in a Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality report as “the perception of Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than white girls of the same age.”
Leah Sava Jeffries (Source: Ashlee Latimer, Rick Riordan’s Social Media Director, on Twitter @ALNL).
No words can possibly capture how happy I am that Black girls will be able to watch the PJO TV series and see themselves in Leah’s Annabeth. Black girls are smart. Black girls are beautiful. Black girls are heroes. Black girls deserve love. Seeing these ideas affirmed in a kids’ show would have meant the world to my younger self – hell, it means the world to me TO-DAY, at my grown age. I truly wish the joy of feeling seen to all kids.
With love,
Attou
P.S.: I haven’t been reading anything new (now that school is over, I’m working hard to finish all those books I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters – add me on Goodreads to keep up!). However, today being New Music Friday, I’ve been listening to new releases such as Doja Cat’s “Vegas.” This single was written and performed for the soundtrack of the upcoming Elvis Presley biopic. Notably, Doja chose to sample the original version of “Hound Dog” recorded by African American R&B singer Big Mama Thornton rather than Elvis's cover of the song. Considering that Elvis has been repeatedly accused of building his career on copying and even stealing from Black artists, Doja’s decision, in my view, is a powerful move – a form of reclamation that deserves to be highlighted.
Wow! it is so well-written. I agree 100% with Black Annabeth and Brown Grover. It's quite a feat on the part of the author to submit to this vision of the fans. Young black girls and boys will really see themselves in these two heroes of Percy Jackson. Well-done!