Yes, I just wanted to make the point for purposes of clarification about the origins of the story. It’s that later association with black people of African descent, I guess, that led to the demise of Sambo’s restaurant, even thought they clearly presented the character as Indian.
Just to post something here: I am aware that darkness being equating evil of sinisterness dates back in Western ideas to wel before Christ. Early missionaries were well aware of it and illustrated (in writing and description) some messages with it. It was not intriniscally connected to skin tone, and in fact was used in the oppossitte manner, to mention how certain peoples had embraced the “light” in spirit while remaining dark in skin.
I was trying to do a lit search (SAHM version, of course) on visual imagery and racism before starting this. Sorry to be slow.
This is the kind of thing I was wondering about, “On the Malleability of Automatic Attitudes: Combating Automatic Prejudice With Images of Admired and Disliked Individuals”. But it’s 15 pages long and we were busy today.
I also found work by Dr. Henry Giroux, author of The Mouse that Roared. This particular article of his, on the “Disneyfication” of children’s culture, was better received, though. It’s full of interesting ideas that I’d like to explore.
I’m surprised that people took umbrage at my assertion that dressing a white character in black/dark clothing has a deleterious effect that mimics racism. You don’t see that, when you look at those villains? The images are 90% black, just a little pasty white face. For all intents and purposes, they’re black!
Maybe I should be googling Jesse Jackson, I could swear people have protested negative use of black in our media.
And, here is a course in which the professor uses Disney to teach “Media Literacy.” Given the company’s scope and impact, such analysis seems important.
If we’re also debating whether children’s self-view is affected by the media, here’s a little piece that describes girls in Fiji who started dieting after the cable company arrived. Prior to that, no one had ever seen Melrose Place, ER, or Xena: Warrior Princess. Now, they also acknowledge that obesity was (is?) a legitimate problem in Fiji.
But I find it baffling that people deny the influence of media - Disney, advertising, video games, the whole works. Garbage in, garbage out.
No one is denying the influence of media, we’re just skeptical that it conveys this particular influence.
I agree with you, Fessie.
There was a western convention that light = good and dark = bad before Disney came along. Disney perpetuates it.
When it’s animals, dark ones are bad and light ones are good.
When it’s people, bad ones are sometimes fair but dress in black.
In Fantasia, in the scene where the centaurs pair off and act romantic, they paired up all the centaurs by color: blue with blue, yellow with yellow, or whatever. Otherwise it might have looked like miscegenation. At the time Fantasia was released, miscegenation was illegal in 30 states. So does this scene in Fantasia reinforce racism?
Everybody sees what they want to see, of course. Here’s a loon who thinks Walt Disney is promoting ‘race-mixing.’ :eek:
You could start a whole new thread about sexism in Disney movies, but I think I’d get too worked up to post in it coherently.
I don’t think anyone is denying the influence of media. It’s that we think the concept of dark=bad and light =good goes way back before television and American slavery.
Dark = nighttime when the lions, tigers and bears (oh my) come to eat you in your sleep.
and
Light = daytime with warm sunshine, pretty flowers and singing birds to enjoy.
And it has been stated that most of Disney’s stories are rehashings of European stories where most of the populace is light skinned.
Regarding the wearing of dark/black clothes: I just remembered a few weeks back a doper posted a cute anecdote about his or her young child asking a question about “those black people.” And it turned out he was asking about nuns.
But black as in darkness, not black as in race.
Shadows and the dark - it all comes down to visually-oriented diurnal animals ( us ) having a healthy fear of the night. For very sound evolutionary reasons as we just don’t function well in it. I strongly suspect black ( pitch black, not skin tone black ) as a connotation for sinister reaches back well before recorded history.
Now does that mean that black images as sinister *don’t/i] have a deleterious effect in our modern, sometimes racially charged society? Actually, they might, at least a little. But there is a difference between the black of shadows and darker skin tones and we’d be better served as human beings emphasizing that rather calling for the end of using pitch black as a baleful colour. IMHO it is intrinsic to the species.
Making less attractive characters the hero and the gorgeous ones villains? Sure, that teaches a real lesson in reality. Having an occasional character clad all in white ( or whatever ) be the bad guy and the one in black be the good guy? Sure, an occasional changeup is always useful - but of course it only works if there is an expectation to confound.
- Tamerlane
Because it’s dramatic that way. Dark is ominous; most of us a scared of the dark as children, after all. And a pale face in all that darkness is dramatic, or creepy or both.
Or to turn it around, was the fact that the James Bond villain Baron Samedi wore all white a slam at white people - or is it the fact that all white looks dramatic on a guy with dark skin ?
I just want to add that nowadays the anti-hero is generally considered to be way more badass than the conventional good-guy hero, and this has completely shot to hell all previous conventions of “black = bad.” Now the hero wears black, whether that’s The Punisher, Max Payne, V for Vendetta, Batman, or any number of other heroes.
It has and it hasn’t - you could say those heroes are more compelling because they have badness [or badass-ness] in them. But you make a good point anyway.
Didn’t Westerns, when the genre got going, usually put the villain in dark clothes? Then again a lot of film villains perpetrate their villainy at night, and don’t wish to be noticed, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t wear light colored clothing. Associating that with racism seems a bit of a stretch to me.
Seems like kind of a wild hypothesis to me. Dark clothes are scarier in Western culture because they’re somber and funereal. Dracula wouldn’t have appeared as frightening if he’d been dressed like Tom Wolfe.
Disney’s track record regarding the portrayal of minority groups over the years has been decidedly mixed, but surely no more so than any other major media empire of the same era, and far less than some.
Frankly, I think we ass-ugly people have a much more legitimate complaint about our overall portrayal as Disney villlains.
In the old cowboy movies the bad guy wore a black hat. Good guy white. The actors were the same color. It may have been for the audience to easily distinguish the difference. Then there is the expression mighty white of you. It does not have a mighty black counterpoint.
Argh! Frog Princess! It’s a completely different story. And one we’re hardly familiar with at all, apparently.
But the heros wear dark colored clothing.
Snow White wears a yellow skirt but her top is dark blue and her hair is black as coal.
Is she half asian half black?
Sleeping Beauty spends most of the film in dark clothes. A brown skirt, and a dark brown bodice.
The problem I have with this arguement is that Disney can’t win. You have set up the arguement that if the villian always have dark skin or dark clothes. How many times do you have a villian who is fair and wears only white? Mobey Dick? Big Nurse
The heros in Disney films may be primarily fair skinned but their clothing is not but having dark colored clothing on the hero means nothing in this arguement.
This convention comes from ballet not from Disney. In a ballet if the chorus is given colorful costumes, you match the men and women by color. I don’t think it is racist. I think is it just color deisgn.
Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. All dressed in black, not really very bad-ass.
This thread makes me think of this 4th of July entry on an being an immigrant to America.
Specifically this part:
All this talk about the color of Disney characters, and nobody’s mentioned the obvious? How about Mickey Mouse? You don’t get much more Disney hero than Mickey, and he’s almost all black.