1 | Robert Monroe

April 11th, 2007 at 7:26 am

I’m not looking forward to seeing “Song of the South” released on DVD. In fact, I am in the process of writing to Disney to let them know that I will no longer buy any of their “classic” films on DVD because of the racist content. My children wanted “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan” after seeing the commercials. Not having seen all of the films myself I went ahead and picked them up. “Dumbo contains the “blacks as crows” scene and “Peter Pan” has a scene where Native Americans are depicted in a racist manner. I don’t want my children exposed to this type of garbage.

When I talked to my father about this last weekend he told me that he wrote to Disney 40 years ago because of images on “Wide World of Disney” of Africans cooking whites in pots and the negative effect they were having on my brother and me.

After all of the negative attention that Mel Gibson received after spewing anti-Jewish statements while drunk it is amazing to me that the Disney corporation would seriously consider releasing DVD’s that contain racist imagery while sober.

I understand that it is a business decision and a desire to put their product out their for collectors and a new generation but these images hurt and they are also used by those who wish to educate their children in the ways of racism. In the late 1990’s I worked as the manager of the foreign film department of a video store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One day, a regular customer called requesting Shirley Temple movies that also had Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in them to show her daughters. After checking what was in stock I informed her that the movies that she had not rented were out. She then asked me if I had any “darkie movies”. After asking her what a “darkie movie” was she told me that they were movies “Black people were treated like darkies”. This woman, whose husband was a movie producer, and I had a heated discussion and the next day her account with the store was cancelled. But, here was someone who was educating her children to be racists and these Hollywood created images were her teaching tools. How many others out there are using the images in “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan” the same way and are looking forward to the release of “Song of the South” for further instruction? Releasing these films out of context and without an extra feature discussing the history of these images and acknowledging the damage that these images have done and continue to do is irresponsible of Disney and something that should be corrected as soon as possible.