He’s the main character in an adult Japanese cartoon?
Also, Donald Duck is white, and he’s always a jerk. Plus, why isn’t he wearing any pants?
OK, wait – 1010011010 - are you trying to assert that racism is a thing of the past in America?
Were you here during Hurricane Katrina? Did you see the coverage? Did you hear the stories? It’s probably been discussed here already & doesn’t need to be resurrected by me - I’m just amazed that anyone would assert that racism is “solved” in our country.
If that’s really your point, I’ll start a new thread.
Still looking for black/negative association links. I think you guys are being naive about the impact of visual imagery - I think it’s much, much more powerful than you’re allowing. Maybe I’m biased, because I am an artist so I use those tools all the time myself.
But you’re correct that I haven’ yet proved my point.
fessie, I thought you got jumped on a bit harshly in the other thread for raising a point that certainly deserves consideration. I am awash in planning a syllabus right now for a fall course so I can’t do this justice, either… but I am fairly certain that Roger Sanjek, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and perhaps even Stephen Jay Gould make the point that Western Europeans, when encountering Africans for the first time, deliberately made the connection to darker pigmented people being “black.” The slave trade took place mostly in West Africa. West Africans aren’t particularly dark people. Being literal, it would make sense to refer to them phenotypically as “brown.” There was an intent to “darken” African people and “lighten” Europeans. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture by Jan Nederveen Pieterse discussed the motif of Europeans trying to washing away the darkness of Africans in a literal sense (as in soap) but also in a spiritual sense (as in Christianity). Of course, scrubbing someone’s skin with lye soap isn’t going to make them lighter - they are unassimilable, both physically and in a spiritual sense.
Another interesting point is that there does seem to be this near universal elevation of white as good and dark as bad. I’d be hard pressed to find a culture that places a value on dark skin over light skin. But in West Africa and in Southeast Asia, for instance, there is a cottage industry of skin lightening products.
To respond to the question: I wouldn’t expect there to be a blatant, outright decision by Disney execs in recent times, at least, to make characters appear more fiendish by making them wear dark clothes. But I do think that there is a subconscious connection that we all have that operates on some level. Just my $.02 during a coffee break.
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The script for Dumbo was mostly by a bunch of Spaniards (including a certain Salvador Dalí you may have heard of elsewhere); while I’ve never heard it in English, in Spanish those crows have the same Mexican voices as the vultures in Jungle Book. There were different accents all over the place, in those movies… in the 90s that moron Eisner got them redubbed (including changing the songs) in an attempt to get the (C) refreshed and several Spanish judges initiated causes de oficio against him. We used to see those as a good way to get a wide exposure to different accents. Sadly, current Disney movies are doing the same as most US movies and get two or three different dubs (not that I mind knowing that three different guys are getting paid for each job, but it’s still silly).
Are the crows caricatures, in the English-language version? Sure. Most characters are. Heck, Stromboli is a huge caricature in Collodi’s book - does that mean Collodi was anti-Italian? Should he have been kicked out of his country for racism? I had a laugh reading the Spanish caricatures in Asterix in Hispania and in Witches Abroad … so long as they’re not demeaning, there’s nothing wrong with caricatures. Would you rather have a movie where 90% of the characters are caricatures or one where 100% of them are bleached and nobody is from anywhere other than “neutral city, neutral place”?
Thank you, Hippy Hollow.
M’kay, finally did the right search.
Professor Olivia Gude, an artist and educator at the U. of Chicago, has a good piece on color and symbolism in Western culture.. She notes that “Thus, unexamined and unchallenged assumptions about the normalcy of color associations become a vehicle for reinscribing racially charged symbolism into current consciousness.”
Wikipedia has a breakdown of the whole color spectrum.
Now, are you guys gonna argue that a negative association with a color never translates into a negative association with a person of that color? I really doubt it. I think it’s so ingrained that we never realize we’re doing it.
How many of you men would wear a pink shirt?
Color has meaning.
Disney artists, in this day and age, know damn good and well what they’re doing, and they ought to knock it off. The Lion King is awful.
AND another thing — researchers note (and people here have mentioned) that color associations vary from culture to culture.
Doesn’t that prove my point? That the associations are taught, reinforced, used? And that they could be un-taught, if people wanted to?
Both of my brothers (one has a pink shirt, the other pink and salmon polos). Neither is gay, both are european. MarriedBro, he with the pink shirt, is a construction supervisor and SingleBro a financial manager.
Now, why would you make a point of saying they’re not gay?
Because 20 years ago no European would have dared wear pink unless he really, really did not mind being taken for gay, and while now it’s not a point hereabouts I’ve had European coworkers get bad reactions for their pastel shirts from American coworkers. I had to explain to several Americans that no, wearing a pink shirt with a grey suit does not make you gay.
You may have noticed that, while the majority of this board appears to be more liberal-minded than those coworkers of mine, it’s also vastly American.
Thanks for asking, I hoped someone would 
It’s a good example of color associations changing over time.
Zebra, there may be a version of Sleeping Beauty where she’s wearing brown, I sure don’t know.
Here is what she, and the other Disney princesses, look like nowadays.
Oh, and there’s this. And this. Or this . And these, for rubbing your kid’s face in it (literally).
One problem with this thesis is that while the traditional reaction to black the colour is negative, and the racist reaction to black the skin tone is also negative, they aren’t negative in the same way.
White racists don’t, as a rule, think of people with black skin as evil, but rather as inferior. Both are broadly speaking “bad”, but evil has a potential glamour to it that “inferior” simply doesn’t possess.
Think for example of Darth Vader. He wears black, his character is (at least at the start) wholly ‘evil’. But no-one would think him contemptable in the same manner as the traditional image of the ‘racially inferior black man’, the poor shuffling sambo (or even the brutal rapist sub-human that is the most foul aspect of the racist imagination). His black is ‘bad’, but it is a bad that is glamerous - the ‘dark side’ is supposed to be attractive (if falsely)!
It is this sort of glamour that is invoked in the use of black clothing in fashion - think of Goths wearing all black. Black may be bad in Western iconography, but it is “bad” in a way many want to be. No-one wants to be “bad” as in inferior.
I thought that racism nowadays was less about blacks as “inferior” (as portrayed in older movies, “step-n-fetchit” and minstrel shows) and more about them being a scary, criminal menace. Particularly young men.
I’m not totally sure. I’ll let you know the very minute I meet or see someone with skin that is literally the same color as Maleficent’s dress. Because “black” (the color used in clothing) and “black” (the term used to describe an extremely wide range of skin tones none of which is actually black and any of which turn up in non-evil clothing all the time) are not the same.
I own and wear several pink shirts (in various shades; one is more of a melon color, but the other two are as pink as a newborn baby girl’s rattle). All three of my suits are black. Sometimes I wear the black suit with a pink shirt. Does this have anything to do with anything?
I need to emphasize this question, because I asked it once and never got an answer: do you actually believe that the character of Scar in The Lion King was intended by his animators to be a “black” lion, in the same sense that we would call James Earl Jones a “black” man? And that Mufasa was intended by his creators to be a “white” lion, in the same sense that we would call Jeremy Irons a “white” man?
Do you actually believe that the coloring of the hyenas (gray) reflects racial issues? That they are colored gray in an effort to depict a particular race? The three actors selected to play the hyenas are a black female, a Hispanic male, and a white male; the white male is playing the stupid, incoherent, sublingual hyena. I have never met a gray human being; which race, exactly, is being suggested by the hyenas?
Do you really maintain that the role of Rafiki in this film is similar to the role of Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequels - a bumbler and a character to be mocked?
Cool! I love Asterix. I have about 28 of them, from Asterix the Gaul to Asterix and Son. Entertaining as hell and educational too!
However, I was always embarrassed by the depiction of the African pirate - see him here. As a Black person I find that caricature quite demeaning, and the translation in English reinforces that (direct quote from one of the books when Asterix and Obelix sink their ship: “I’se cold!”). Maybe it came across differently in Goscinny and Uderzo’s orginal, but every African I’ve ever seen in the books looks like this (expect Cleopatra, she’s hot).
Don’t these people ever get tired of sniffing out racism? This endless witch hunt for racists is a poison slowly killing off all public dialogue and discourse.
But that’s always been a part of racism - the usual excuse for lynchings in the past was exactly that: Black man accused of doing scary criminal things (such as raping White women).
But that was just an aspect of a fundamental inferiority - Black man as animalistic, unable to control urges, criminal, sub-human. Think Birth of a Nation.
“Black as evil” is, I think, very different, has a different image - potentially more sophisticated, clever, attractive (at least superficially). Think of the romantic image of the vampire - ‘some undead aristocrat in a (black!) cape nibbling on the neck of a bosom-heaving heroine in white lace’ is a world away from ‘ugly Black thug brutally raping White woman’. The former is a far more attractive image than the latter …
Moreover, the traditional image of “white” vs. “black” in clothing etc. is usually one of choice: people in fiction are offered a choice of whether to serve the dark or the light, and to make the plot interesting, the dark has got to have its attractions (Star Wars is an excellent example of this sort of thing). One can imagine a cowboy movie in which the hero, disillusioned by fate, puts on a black hat and guns people down - then is redeemed by the love of a good woman, symbolically throws away the black hat, and puts on a white one (incredibly trite, but true to the meme).
In contrast, the racist narrative is all about the inevitable inferiority of the Black person.
Have you seen the film?
Please answer that question.
How long ago did you see it?
No, racism today consists largely of the left demeaning and demonizing white people.
Probably because she’s the product of generations of inbreeding among Macedonian aristocrats. 