Bob

Thankfully, my brothers and I did grow up to be a well-adjusted people despite the racist imagery that we were exposed to as a child. But, I think that a lot of that was due to the efforts of my parents and the times that I grew up in. My maternal grandmother, though, who was raised in the segregated South with these images was adamant that her ancestors did not come from Africa (she would state that she was descended from Egyptians…my brothers and I finally showed her a map and proved to her that Egypt was in Africa). We cannot assume that these images, though, are not damaging. Black people who grew up in the pre-Civil Rights era knew this…people who grew up in Nazi Germany knew this. Images are powerful and the effect, unless counteracted, can be damaging to someone’s psyche or someone’s perceptions of others.

My concern is also why it seems to be acceptable to release some racist imagery and not others. Our cultural history is replete with anti-Semitic imagery but I don’t think that anyone in their right mind would even think about releasing any films, cartoons, comics or ephemera of those images unless it was in a historical context…and perhaps not even then.

Ragnell, when Disney releases these DVD’s they know that a large segment of the purchasers are adult collectors (case in point, the metal tin collections they release…most children are not interested in seeing black and white Mickey Mouse cartoons or TV episodes of Davey Crockett) therefore a documentary discussing the historical significance of the film is not too unreasonable.

Bob

Sounds like a responsible compromise.

From what my father tells me, my brother and I, after watching an episode of “Wide World of Disney” that portrayed Africans cooking white people in pots, said that we no longer wanted to be Black. It was at this point that he wrote to Walt Disney and forbade us to watch Disney cartoons, Bugs Bunny, Popeye, The Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, Tarzan and Jungle Jim movies, anything with Stepin’ Fetchit and Mantan Moreland or, from how we saw it at the time, anything else that was good on TV.

I grew up in a time when racist images were shown on television and quite often appeared on what would be considered children’s programming. Many people born after a particular time…1970 or so… have probably never seen these programs in their entirety (many were later shown with the offensive material omitted). Some years ago, I returned to college as an older student and attended a presentation on the Rutgers University campus about racist images in the media. None of the younger students had nver seen any of the images that were showed that evening and were shocked that they were ever shown on television. They had been raised after the cultural shifts of the 1960’s and 1970’s caused programmers to censor what they aired.

By Disney releasing these films without any commentary or documentary putting them in their historical context they are contributing to the spread of damaging racist images. Images that can be used, as were the Shirley Temple movies rented by the woman on the Upper West Side of Manhattan looking to show “darkie movies” to her daughters or as the KKK used THE BIRTH OF A NATION as a recruiting tool up through the 1960’s. One person’s entertainment (or a corporation’s lust for profit) can be the source of a child’s negative self-image.

Bob

Tony