I smell a movie based entirely off someone's complaint that there's no black Disney princess.
Yeah, it sounds like they're forcibly trying to be ethnically diverse here. Not that this is in and of itself a bad thing, but this reeks of the Princess Affirmative Action Program.
My experience is that little girls are little girls, and most of them just want to be pretty. They like the
idea of princessdom more than anything. I worked at Disney World for a while and used to see girls of all colors running around in princess gear. I thought that was pretty cool, that these kids just identified with the fact that Belle liked to read or Jasmine owned a tiger. They saw beyond skin color and looked to what was really important: Glitter.
If they're going to do this, why not base it on an African fable or something? Then it would seem less panicky and more culturally authentic. Or what about telling the story of Cleopatra (well, up until the snake part, anyway)? Some think she may have been black. At the very least, she wasn't lilly white.
Ah, my fond childhood memories of reading tales about the Princess of New Orleans... oh, wait a minute..