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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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It's because Disney had much, much worse racial stereotypes in some of their earlier cartoons and comics, so when the 90s PC wave rolled around they went on a panicked spree to remove anything that could be deemed remotely offensive. It was probably a good idea for them: you see how much overexaggerated criticism Disney got for the Song of the South, and that was about in the bottom tenth of Disney racism.

Yeah, I've never seen Song of the South, but this is making me wonder if it deserves the criticism it gets. I know little about it, but is the problem once again mostly that it depicts black people acting like black people of the time?

For example, you'll never see certain episodes of the original broadcast of Tom and Jerry because many of those episodes feature a sassy black maid who doesn't take any shit from Tom. Why was that deemed worthy to never be broadcast again? I don't know. I guess because we are not allowed to ever see a black maid on TV. In certain broadcasts, the black maid was even replaced with a white teenage girl. That's representation for you!

I've seen it. Saw it as a kid, once in the theater I think. I remember a character named Tar Baby, a pretty pejorative term to the modern ear. "Bear Necessities" was a memorable song. (edit: a memorable song that had nothing to do with that film, thanks for the corrections, I got it. Please insert Zip a dee doo dah)

Isn't Song of the South a Brer Rabbit retelling?

I'm not sure how you tell Brer Rabbit without the story with the tar baby. It's the most famous Brer Rabbit story by a wide margin, isn't it? When I read Brer Rabbit when I was a small child, I genuinely didn't realise it had any connection to African-Americans at all. It wasn't until I was in my 20s, in an unrelated context, that I discovered the stories that had delighted young-Olive came out of an African-American folk tradition. At the time, then, I took the story about the tar baby entirely at face value - it was an effigy made of tar and dressed up that Brer Rabbit genuinely mistook for a child, hit, got stuck on the tar, and thereby was trapped for Brer Fox.

Wiki tells me that the story predates any use of 'tar baby' as a slur, so... I don't know, it seems silly, to me. It is actually a story about a baby made of tar, and nothing in the story has anything to do with race.

Maybe I'm naive here, but... there is just genuinely nothing in the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby that involves race. It's a pretty classic trickster archetype story - the fox traps the rabbit, and the rabbit cleverly tricks his way out of it.

'Bear Necessities', incidentally, is from The Jungle Book. Nothing to do with Song of the South. I thought the famous ear worm from Song of the South was 'Zip-a-dee-doo-da'?

I'm not sure how you tell Brer Rabbit without the story with the tar baby. It's the most famous Brer Rabbit story by a wide margin, isn't it?

I would guess it's similar in familiarity to the briar patch story.

It is the briar patch story. The tar baby is how Brer Rabbit was captured - "please don't throw me in the briar patch!" was the trick he used to escape.

Enough B'rer Rabbit stories start with him escaping capture that you sometimes see it separated from the Tar Baby story, and it's probably a little more famous because it's been transposed to so many other settings and works where the tar-mix wouldn't. But at least in the Uncle Remus stories version, yeah, it's very explicitly two separate halves of the same incident (cw: it's... a 1880s Southern work).

Correct on the song. My mistake.

As for Tar baby, I haven't checked the etymology of when it came to be considered a (rather dated now) slur, but as early as the 70s.

(edit: spelling)

Bear Necessities is Jungle Book not Song of the South.

You're right! I hang my head in shame.

There was some stereotyping, but the primary complaint was that it depicted a black sharecropper in the post-reconstruction era who seemed basically content with his lot in life. In my mind that's not that bad. There are plenty of people who live in unjust and meager circumstances who still manage to find happiness, and it doesn't imply an endorsement of the whole social system. That said I haven't actually seen it, I'm mostly going off the many many critical articles from the early 2010s.

There was some stereotyping, but the primary complaint was that it depicted a black sharecropper in the post-reconstruction era who seemed basically content with his lot in life.

In my experience, this is the complaint in the motte, and the complaint in the bailey is that it depicts a black slave in the antebellum era who seemed basically content with his lot in life. (The people complaining are historically illiterate and do not understand what the film is about.)

To be fair, Song of the South is really vague about its time; the Hays Code reviewers supposedly asked for explicit statement in-film that it was set post-Civil War, but in the released work you end up having to read tea leaves and styles of clothing to nail it down. Yes, Remus's family are clearly sharecroppers rather than slaves, but Georgia did have a (tiny, heavily exploited) number of free African-Americans pre-Civil War (though almost all closer to cities); Johnny's family's behavior toward the African-Americans is way too familiar to have been acceptable in antebellum Georgia, but sanitizing treatment of 'the help' in media was absolutely common to antebellum writing and post-Reconstruction writing about pre-war behaviors.

Supposedly one of the scriptwriters wanted to make it more explicit, and there's probably something interesting to say about what a film closer to his version would have looked like, but given that one of the other guys wrote stuff such that the Hayes Code thought it was too racist for the time, and he's the one with more obvious fingerprints on the final work, I don't think it's an unreasonable complaint.

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