Song of the South and racism
Filed under: Animation, Politics
David M. Korn has written a lengthy, and I do mean lengthy, piece on Disney's Song of the South for Film Threat. His gist is that the movie is undeserving of its label as a racist animated flick. Other films, he reasons, which have misrepresented the plight of blacks during the slave era and The Reconstruction such as Gone with the Wind and (especially) The Birth of a Nation can still be purchased and viewed today, as opposed to Song of the South, which has not been seen, or been available, since a brief re-release in 1986.
Korn blames Disney and what he cites as an unwillingness to stand up for its creations. Recent examples of this include a lyric from the opening song in Aladdin that was removed for suggesting Arabs enjoy throat-slitting (of course, they kept the scene where a shopkeeper threatens to chop off Jasmine's hand, but nevermind). The Lion King was also meticulously crafted so as not to be offensive to the African continent.
While reading Korn's take I was reminded of Bob Clampett's 1943 animated short Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, another product of a less enlightened era (and one of the Censored 11 animated shorts that were banned in 1968) that depicted blacks in a less than flattering light. I have not seen Song of the South, but I have seen Coal Black, and it would certainly be considered racist by today's standards. Seeing it in the context of the era in which it was released however, it's a silly, and admittedly misguided, cartoon.I don't think Coal Black should be "unbanned" by any means, but history has a way of revealing things that audiences may have been blind to back in the day, and, using Birth of a Nation as an example once again, it doesn't hurt to give people credit for being able to see the complex dual nature of impolitic cinema fare that can be lauded for its artistic accomplishment while slammed for its racist content in equal measure. That kind of approach creates discussion, which is always better than sweeping history under the rug and pretending as if such portrayals were never a part of American cinema.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-08-2005 @ 1:14PM
Tom said...
Funny you should write about "Song Of The South" and "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs" in the same article. I purchased a copy of SOTS on eBay and embedded on the DVD was a copy of "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs". The only way you could view it was to use a secondary piece of software to extract the file off of the DVD onto a DVD of its own. Racist, yes, but a part of cinima history. Tom
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