Today, it has seeped into our public school systems with history books depicting images of “happy” slaves, while erasing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the Peculiar Institution. America refused to come to terms with its identity without slavery as a foundation and so a sanitized version of slavery was constructed to absolve the South and the country of guilt, while attempting to trap African-Americans in subservient and demeaning positions.
This degrading trope was born in the years after the Civil War.
In “ Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film,” film scholar Ed Guerrero writes of those years that, “Hollywood seemed undecided about how to interpret the Old South experience in the plantation genre, which was making a limited by feeble comeback.” Films like “Song of the South,” then, depicted supposedly “idyllic” Antebellum and Reconstruction periods in which African Americans were docile, subservient, only present to serve the whims of white people and not dissatisfied with their abhorrent circumstances. Instead of reflecting on the changing state of the nation, the studios used the post-war era to return to the model that made “Gone With the Wind” a massive success in 1939. “Song of the South,” for example, premiered just after World War II when African American soldiers were returning home after fighting for the freedoms of all Americans only to face humiliating Jim Crow laws, segregation and lynchings. However, by overlooking these types of racist and problematic projects from a past time, Disney is not doing themselves or the public any favors. Disney CEO Bob Iger had explained back then that he felt allowing those movies to be seen “wouldn't necessarily sit right or feel right to a number of people today" and that "it wouldn't be in the best interest of our shareholders to bring it back, even though there would be some financial gain.”īoth “Song of the South” and “Dumbo” are disturbing to watch - as are many films, TV shows, and pop culture references born in the 20th century and beyond, especially by Disney.
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