Not particularly. Marnita often follows me around and police’s comments I make with reckless abandon, choosing which bits to pick up and which bits to ignore. Sometimes I bite, sometimes I don’t - at the moment I’m on holiday so I haven’t replied.

But I will say (from a cursory reading) she hasn’t addressed the principal questions…… namely whether stories should be racially protected or not. I personally don’t think they should be - which is why I don’t have problems with a black little mermaid, but then I wouldn’t have problems with a white man playing Go’so the teacher. However, people seem to want to have their cake and eat when it comes to which stories they want to protect and which are fine to mess around with.

The second, somewhat interlinked point, is that there’s a great deal of racial harm that comes with just whacking black actors into historically white stories - because it means we aren’t getting the full smorgasbord of stories available. It’s a very subtle form of co-opted white-washing and I don’t like it. There are plenty of much better mermaid tales out there and we should be trying to rebalance our stories…

As always Marnita has decided to turn it into a tiresome showdown and has failed to realise that she’s often part of the problem. In this case the fact that she’s Danish is neither here nor there - it looks like a win but it really isn’t. She’s holding the same position as me - that stories should belong to everyone, she’s just failed to see she’s arguing the same thing because her current raison d’etre is kicking Penguins because she believes we are the voice of racism.

Here’s me last year writing about the circles Marnita keeps insisting we swim around.

https://medium.com/lucid-nightmare/should-we-really-be-living-in-a-world-of-black-mermaids-d64a3f8e48b8