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Notes -
For those who haven't seen it, "When I See An Elephant Fly" and, while not as well-remembered or about the African-American men in it, "Song of the Roustabouts". The original released in 1941, and while I don't remember if it explicitly writes out the time of the setting, it's clearly post-1920 (there are prominent electrical lights in a non-urban area, airplane are drawn with metal, not cloth).
The dumb critique (eg, the version you get if you try to watch the show in Disney+) is that the crows are minstrel show references. And while they're not Sambo-level stereotypes, even giving the worst interpretation of their beaks, minstrel shows did have African-American characters with spats and pronounced AVEE, giving Life Lessons in with overstated emotion. I don't think that is my problem with minstrel shows, but for some people the cooties are enough (when they want them to be; the same people will carefully ignore much more overt connection when it's costly).
The steelman is that the work as a whole tried to say something, but to do so in 1941 meant compromises with evil that are no longer necessary in 2024. The African-American characters in "Roustabouts" are explicitly compared (and arguably drawn like, though Dumbo's animation in general was a little rough) to apes, are gleefully happy in their work, can't read or write, blow all their pay the day they get paid -- because their cash pay is so little that sending their kids to the circus they work at consumes it all, their room and board is a windowless carriage car, and do I need to spell out Segregation-era education? While I'll admit it's neither the only possible interpretation or intent, I think it's a very plausible read they are dehumanized in the sense that this is showing that they are treated like animals, in-setting, but they're more human and dedicated than the (implicitly and paintedly white) actors who make up the clown posse.
The treatment of the Crows in "When I See an Elephant Fly" is a continuation of that theme: they're not especially smart or formal, but they're clever, reasonably skeptical, and extremely sympathetic. They are, along with Timothy the Mouse (and Dumbo's mother), the only people to care about Dumbo, and they have less cause to do so. This is a more subtle critique, but I think it was still a critique; at a time where segregationists thought whites and African-Americans were the same species only as a fault (Loving v. Virginia wasn't until 1967!), this was to say even if African-Americans were different species, even if all the stereotypes of behavior and mannerism were true, that wouldn't be what mattered compared to what sort of people they were.
But in doing so, it had to play along with those stereotypes. That probably made it a lot more internalized at the time! (And a lot less likely to be protested or banned, though see Song of the South for where playing too far into the stereotypes got a protest movement in turn.) Aaand it meant today, there's not much there but the stereotypes. "Judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their
feathersskin" was a meaningful slogan when Martin Luther King said it, and now it comes on ice cream wrappers; it's room temperature to say an African-American (-coded) character could be a hard worker or insightful. All that's left is the compromise.I think it's still worth recognizing that, but I'm an outlier.
((That said, the crows were highlighted as a Good Example that should be brought forward into new pieces as recently as 2017, in no small part highlighting this perspective... and then infamously weren't, and by 2020 were taboo to mention.))
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