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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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They are obvious caricatures of black people, no doubt. They talk in AAVE, they scat, they banter, they dance in stereotypically black ways (albeit circa 1941). But I'm not certain that most leftists these days would consider any of that to be a bad thing. I think the modern day leftist would probably call it "representation"; it's highlighting and drawing attention to race, and inserting it into a movie that would otherwise be without any particular spotlight on race. Most of the actors voicing the crows were actually black, also.

On its face, sure, one could argue that it isn't racist. But once you add in the cultural context of the time period, especially in the South, I think its harder to make the case that it wasn't an intentional decision to stereotype Black people. I remember taking a course in high school called, "Male/Female Literary Perspectives," and we spent a whole unit talking about gender and racial stereotyping in the Disney animated canon. The crows Dumbo did come up in discussion, as well as the hyenas in The Lion King, as examples of possible racial stereotypes and how those stereotypes could become associated with their character -- in particular, the hyenas being aggressive and dangerous towards Simba and Nala while all having Black and Hispanic accents.

Though its interesting now in current year, how you have people in social justice circles decrying how whitewashed Disney animated films were, and now we have all these remakes with much more diverse casts.

I mean, so? The crows are black, but they're not, like, being made fun of. They're not portrayed negatively. They happen to be wrong about the object level question of whether an elephant can fly, but so would anyone else be.

Is portraying an italian-accented man as a chef wrong? Ethnic stereotypes in entertainment aren't axiomatically evil.

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