Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah: How to Square the Circle of Disney’s Past With Today’s Need For Revisionist Cleansing
“Donald, you can’t do/say/think that!”
“WHYYYYYYY?!?”
“Because I said so.”
Never happened. Perhaps it was because my mom was young and hadn’t decided that teaching me to go along to get along was the best approach to socializing me or because, as a young activist bleeding-heart she was of the mind that more information about how things were and could be was better for my spongey brain, the Do As I Say Because I Said So method of parenting was just not present in my upbringing.
No. Mom tended to indulge me and my curiosity with answers. Sometimes the lessons took a long time to gestate like her hatred for Richard Nixon in 1972 and other times they were immediately traumatic like her detailed explanation of sex years before my hormones kicked in. Erring perhaps on the side of providing me with too much information, Mom wanted me to know about everything.
Her example also taught me to question everything I read or was told. Whenever teachers or school administrators or police or doctors flung their decrees my way, it was an automatic response to question it, to interrogate it, to break it down and make some sort of sense out of it. Assessing motivations was harder because I had to look closely at the behavior behind the demands of my compliance to put together the pieces behind them.
The long term effect all of this nurturing of my critical mind had on me is that, while human and subject to the bias we all carry, I tend to immediately interrogate any demand of conformity to a cause.
I’m not especially passionate about Disney but I am about Star Wars and Marvel so Disney+ was a no brainer. The Mandalorian is a blast and all the Pixar stuff is gorgeous and wonderful.
But wait. Was the name of the leader of those singing crows in Dumbo actually “Jim Crow?” I completely forgot about the musical montage to racist genocide in Peter Pan. The hyenas in The Lion King are not exactly subtle.
Disney has been in business for a long damn time and there are an awful lot of cultural blind spots present when laid out with the whole canon (minus, of course, Song of the South and the host of propaganda shorts made during WWII depicting the Japanese as rat-like creatures and grotesque racial caricatures of Germans and Italians).
Disney has even pre-loaded language to warn viewers that this stuff is embedded right in there.
“It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”
There is still call to erase these outdated cultural depictions entirely. Obviously, the Corporate Mouse is sensitive to this as Song of the South is pretty much unavailable anywhere. An affable house n****r pining a bit for the past when he was a slave is most definitely outdated and, if taken at its face, paints a picture of white supremacy via cartoon unlike anything in popular culture.
The questions that crop up in my medulla, however, are many. Why erase the cultural signifiers of the past—reminders of slavery, of the Civil War, of gender dominance, of ethnic bias—rather than contextualize them? Why bother with them at all and instead simply censor them out of existence? No one is harmed by not having access to Uncle Remus or the Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp, right?
The argument to eliminate these outdated cultural depictions is fairly straight forward: they’re offensive to many people, they proliferate a culture of intolerance and white supremacy, they serve to remind us of attitudes we’d prefer to be put away and left unrevisited. The idea is that absent these reminders of racist and sexist signifiers, society is freer to move past them. Unfortunately, this argument is almost always accompanied by the requisite “Because we said so.” The result being a new bedrock belief that marginalization and suffering grants a certain unassailable moral high ground to those in camp with their offense and imagined pain elevating their opinion to dogma.
What are the long term consequences to this sort of cultural washing? We know that despite Disney making unavailable the Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah romp of an ex-slave showing a white boy his grandmother’s plantation, it isn’t hard for those on that Wasn’t It Better With Slavery power grab to get their grubby mitts on. It isn’t like it was erased and just hidden from view. We know that by creating a hostility toward the flippant use of certain words that those words tend to gain even more power in their suppression despite certain marginalized groups reclaiming them.
Being on the Right Side of History is a truly slippery slope. Take Christopher Columbus as an example. For just over five hundred years streets were named for the guy, we celebrated a federal holiday in his name, he was absolutely on the Right Side of History as a hero. In forty short years, he has gone from hero to colonizing slave apologist and is seen by many as a villain. Our founding fathers went from bold thinkers who fought for the mashup of democracy, republic, and a country on its own to slave-owning monsters who created the platform for white supremacy and cultural genocide. The Right Side of History is a fickle beast.
What I see when I dive into the Disney Vault is a longer history of progress. I see the antiquated views of equal representation culturally in cartoons like The Three Caballeros (1944) and Saludos Amigos (1942) to High School Musical and Elena of Avalor, both examples of Disney fluff but with respect to multiculturalism and ethnic inclusion. Without the ability to see the patronizing and borderline racist perspectives of the 1940s, can we truly appreciate the evolution? Can we understand why Marvel’s Black Panther is watershed without the above the fray view of so many movies absent a full cast of black actors? Without that exclusionary tapestry in view, does Cooglar’s vision even matter as much?
“It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”
This is as good as it gets in terms of trigger warnings, I think. As opposed to Disney capitulating to the demands of our most recent squeaky wheels via social media, treat consumers as critical thinkers with an ability to see offensive ideas and not be threatened by them.
“It may contain outdated cultural depictions so make a choice but understand that your choice may not be everyone else’s choice and if you can’t handle that, don’t subscribe and miss out on all the fucking Star Wars and Marvel shit we’re creating.”
“America, you can’t do/say/think that!”
“WHYYYYYYY?!?”
“Because we said so.”
Nope. Gotta do better than that, my Woke friends.
