So how is it that Gone with the Wind is perfectly ok to show but Song of the South isn’t? The racism in Gone with the Wind seems far more blatant in its racism where the biggest complaint I’ve heard about Song of the South is that it shows a slave, who isn’t a slave since the story is set post civil war, happy about his circumstances.
“The Song of the South” isn’t OK to show because Disney decided not to show it anymore, and Disney owns the movie.
That movies a lot more racist than “Song of the South” get shown all the time is irrelevant.
Yes, I think **Lemur866 **is on to something. It’s less about the public’s sensibilities and more so about their *perception *of Disney. They have no intention on being the one to show a possibly offensive film.
Disney just doesn’t want to deal with the controversy. The idea of Uncle Remus is pretty offensive to many people, and the background of the character is less important than the image.
Part of it is that Song of the South is a children’s movie. Most people worry more about the messages in children’s entertainment than in adult entertainment.
But what is objectionable? It is the telling of African American folktales by an African American. Uncle Remus is the smartest person in the movie. The biggest problem with the movie is it is boring.
You don’t think someone will think there’s a problem with portraying former slaves living an idyllic life as they labor in the fields of their former owners who are going to prevent them from voting or getting an education, segregating them in where they live, where they can visit, where they get a drink of water, and where they can go to the bathroom, denying them the rights and opportunities of other Americans, beating them, unjustly imprisoning them, killing them, all for the next 100 years? You don’t think anybody would dislike the movie for that reason?
Are you asking why the movie doesn’t get shown? Or are you asking how racist the movie really is?
The movie isn’t shown because Disney doesn’t want to deal with the controversy over the movie’s putative racism. Whether the movie is really racist, kinda racist, only a little bit racist, or not racist is not the point. The point is Disney’s public relations machine doesn’t want to get into an argument over how racist the movie is or is not, and how and why. Some studios don’t care about controversy, or maybe they relish controversy. Disney is not one of those studios.
But it’s not a movie about Uncle Remus working in the fields of his former-owner-and-still-de-facto-master. He probably doesn’t like that too much, but that’s not the topic. It’s a movie about his folktales, and he does like his folktales, and why shouldn’t he?
FWIW, the controversy over the movie started as soon as it was released - this is not the case of an old, beloved movie being labeled as racist in hindsight. Plus it includes the tar-baby story - when I was growing up the term “tar-baby” was definitely used as a racial slur against African-American children.
The links in this are probably broken, and might go into Never Never Land, but here’s a comment I remember from many years ago. Disney had (and maybe still has) a section on their site:
Sure. I remember seeing the movie as a little kid, but I haven’t seen it since. How racist is the movie? I have no idea, it could easily be more on the “problematic and clueless” side, rather than the “super-racist” side like “Birth of a Nation”. So take the famous dialect that Uncle Remus uses in the book. Is that racist? Yeah it’s racist, but it was actually how former slaves in that time and place actually spoke. But the white characters don’t speak in a transcribed phonetic dialect, even though they didn’t speak in a standard dialect either. So how racist is it?
But that’s not the point. The reason Disney doesn’t show the movie is that they have determined that its deserved or undeserved reputation for racism makes it a PR problem to show. They don’t want the PR hassle, so the movie is unavailable.
Gullah. Apparently still spoken in some if the Sea Islands on the SC coast.