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As a child of television, growing up in the 1960s, I was exposed to a constant barrage
of animated cartoons, many made well before the advent of television, and many made specifically for television in the late
1950s and early 1960s. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was also receiving a steady diet of White-themed race-based ideology.
I was constantly being fed a line that told me that being White meant being superior to all other peoples. This mindset has
its roots in the false notion, as defined by author Richard C. Lewontin, of biological determinism. In it, there are three
main points: that there are innate differences between humans, that these differences are biologically inherited, and that
as a result of these differences society will tend to stratify and form a social hierarchy. The ideology behind biological
determinism is usually employed to justify an attitude of racial superiority throughout American culture, and it can often
be easily seen in entertainment directed toward children, such as comic books and cartoons.
An excellent example of how the ideology of biological determinism can affect popular culture comes in the class reading of
"Meeting the Mongols"; an episode of the popular Buck Rogers in the 25th Century comic strip. Notions of White superiority
over Asians peoples are rife throughout. In battle with evil Chinese raiders who have destroyed American society, Buck and
his fellow White rebels relive a Darwinian process of re-evolution, while "cherish(ing) the undying flame of freedom." In
recalling the spirit of his White ancestors, Buck invokes the motivating drive of manifest destiny to save himself while lost
in the desert. And his enemy, indeed the enemy of the entire White race, is a cartoon version of the evil Oriental: thieves
of Western science, they covet White women and think nothing of performing vivisection on captured American soldiers. As is
expected, the White race eventually wins out over the "biologically determined" Asian bad guys; thus the story of the more
advanced Anglo-Saxon race continues (Nowlan & Calkins).
In comics and cartoons
throughout the 20th century, the narrative was often the same: only White characters are permitted to be superheroes, only
Whites are allowed to appear strong and superior, and only Whites are worthy of having their stories told. If other racial/ethnic
groups are depicted at all, they are negative portrayals, based on stereotypes, ambivalence and prejudice (Singer). In this
discussion, I will be concentrating on animated cartoons, both in film and on television, and on how they illustrate racial/ethnic
groups and differences. Because they are particularly geared toward kids, cartoons have more popular appeal; they appear relatively
benign. However, because they seem harmless, they can be, in fact, more dangerous. And because they are ubiquitous (thanks
to television), they are insidious. By regular repetition of the negative/nonexistent racial representation model, the narrative
that tells of the American nation as a White nation, and by extension the ideology of biological determinism, is perpetuated
and upheld.
Many cartoons televised in the early 1960s came out of the 1940s WWII era,
and they reflected those times: they often served as wartime propaganda to rally the movie-going public against the enemies.
But they also had a higher agenda: to express a certain brand of White unity. As entertaining as they often were, these particular
cartoons commonly carried highly insensitive portrayals of Germans, Italians and Japanese, meant to instill an "us-versus-them"
mentality. For a medium based on caricature and lampoonery, subjects like Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini were ripe for the picking,
but there lay a crucial difference between how Europeans were portrayed as opposed to the highly racialized depiction of the
Japanese. Hitler comes across generally as merely a deranged individual, and few attempts are made to tar the entire German
nation with the brush of insanity. Conversely, however, nasty representations of Japanese leaders are often extrapolated to
encompass the entire racial group, as opposed to a single person. This is biological determinism in action once again. Examples
of this overall anti-Asian attitude appear in the 1943 cartoon short Tokyo Jokio, in which a spoof of newsreels has a Pathé-like
rooster morph into an evil, slant-eyed vulture with a thick Asian accent, and in the 1944 cartoon Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,
which has Bugs referring to a Japanese soldier as "slant-eyes" and "monkey-face" (Cohen 54). As wartime propaganda, these
cartoons were generally thought to be highly effective as well as entertaining. A generation later, however, these cartoons
were still being shown on television. Unfortunately, they were shown without explanation of their historical context and outside
of the socially significant "us-versus-them" attitude. Additionally, the depiction of racial differences carried with it another
burden: German enemy combatants are often depicted as mere buffoons, while the Japanese are literally portrayed as a subhuman
race. Comic books also fell into line with this ideology, often with story lines that appeared to question a German-American's
patriotism versus the loyalty (or lack of same) in the average Japanese-American citizen (Wright 48). It was much easier to
accept that a German-American, proclaiming love for his country, could be loyal, trustworthy and totally patriotic, whereas
it was nearly impossible to accept that a Japanese-American could be anything other than a "low-down dirty Jap spy" (the U.S.
Government's sanctioning of this attitude---the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps while no such
fate befell German-Americans---was particularly illustrative of this outlook). The combined ideological effect between comics
and cartoons was complete. This led young readers and viewers (like me) to assume that these characterizations were not based
on a larger social agenda but rather on cultural and racial truths. In this manner, the subliminal ideology of the superiority
of the White race---Americans, English and Germans---is maintained.
Racial/ethnic
stereotyping in cartoon shorts was not reserved strictly for wartime propagandistic use, however. Many early cartoons made
strictly for their entertainment value also contained highly objectionable representations of race by today's standards. In
1943, Warner Bros. cartoon factory gave us Robert Clampett's "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs," a black-faced send-up of Disney's
popular "Snow White." By most accounts, it was well-made: energetic and entertaining, even entailing intense study on the
part of the animators to get the jitterbugging dance sequences just right (Lindvall 131). However, it was in its portrayal
of grotesque Black stereotypes that has rendered it one of the most notorious cartoons ever made.
Opening with "Mammy" telling her little girl the fairy tale of "So White" (with coal-black hair), the story begins with Queenie,
a large and greedy woman (whose castle's warehouse is packed to the rafters with items rationed during WWII: sugar, coffee,
rubber tires, etc., an effort to show her as really evil, i.e., unpatriotic). She makes a wish: "Magic mirror on the wall,
bring me a prince about six feet tall," after which a zoot-suited, cigarette-holder-puffing hepcat, Prince Chawmin', shows
up at her door. He smiles and shows off a mouthful of gold teeth---save for the front two, which are dice (coming up seven).
Ignoring Queenie, he instead notices the youthful So White, who is innocently hanging laundry while she laments, "Some folks
say I is kinda dumb, but I know some day my prince will come." He comes on to her and they start jitterbugging, to the jealous
consternation of Queenie. She puts out a contract on So White; soon a black car pulls up, marked on the side with the advertisement
"Murder Inc.: We rubs out anything $1.00. Midgets half-price. Japs free" (another wartime dig at the enemy of the day). The
mob inside the car kidnaps So White and drives off. Later we see the car stop--and out hops So White, waving at the mob, who,
all smiles and lipstick-smudges, wave back and drive off. She has to trek through a forest, where she meets up with seven
diminutive Black Army soldiers. She joins the dwarves and cooks for them happily. Meanwhile, Queenie is preparing a poisoned
apple for So White (just as in the original) who naively eats it and passes out. After the dwarves dispatch with Queenie with
their military arsenal, Prince Chawmin' offers to bring So White around with one of his patented dynamite kisses (which he
calls, in a reference to Citizen Kane, "Rosebud";), to no avail. After a dozen attempts, the smallest dwarf kisses So White,
who revives and smooches him back. The reason? A "military secret." He kisses So White one more time and her braids stick
out, with two small American flags on each (Sampson 163).
So many negative stereotypes
got play in "Coal Black" that it's difficult to know where to start. The "mammy" figure, the highly sexed hottie heroine,
the randy Romeo Prince Chawmin', with the gambling jones, and the seven clumsy heroes, all with huge lips and all bouncing
to the music---almost all of them have roots in damaging racial imagery seen in films ever since Birth of a Nation. What makes
this film even more effective at stressing prejudice and a sense of ambivalence toward Blacks is in its attempts at playing
up patriotic fever. This, when combined with such negatively racialized portrayals, justifies the ideology of the racial hierarchy
by making any differences seem benign, even harmless: "Look, Ma, they're patriotic too--- just like us!"
"Coal Black" contains some seriously negative racist imagery by modern standards; at the time, however, the animators themselves
typically appeared to be oblivious to any harmful effects their portrayals might have. Walter Lantz, director of several jazz-themed
"Swing Symphonies" cartoons, all with all-Black casts, including "Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat" (another cartoon excoriated
for its rampant racial imagery), rationalized it thus: "We never offended or degraded the colored race and they were all top
musical cartoons, too" (Cohen 124). This sense of relative naïveté seems to be typical of those animators working in the 1930s
and 40s. The drive toward getting a laugh (and thus profit) was the chief motivating force. As Terry Lindvall states in Darker
Shades of Animation:
Being of a class of film artists who were the lowliest, the least, the last and
the bottom of the barrel of success, they were less likely to disparage those who lived and struggled with them on the lower
levels. There was no intentional conspiracy to attack ethnic groups, only authority figures. (134)
Although this explanation can be seen as excusing the racist mindset of those animators, is can also be viewed as an indictment
of the natural institutionalized brand of racist ideology. While some of the truly awful examples of racial misrepresentation
in animated theatrical shorts cartoons have been essentially shelved and are rarely aired on television, the effortlessly
racist mindset that informed works like "Coal Black" and "Scrub Me Mama" persisted in their and their cohorts' later works
(Bob Clampett, director of "Coal Black," went on to create popular TV cartoon shows like "Beany and Cecil"). Other animators
continued to find subjects of derision in both the cultural and physical traits of people of color.
This continued ambivalence toward nonwhite peoples got its greatest boost by the arrival of television: it was free, on an
average of five to seven hours a day, and a major source of ideology dissemination. Made-for-television cartoons continued
the trend of stereotyping racial/ethnic groups that earlier theatrically-released animation established. Native Americans
were depicted badly in shows like "Go-Go Gophers," in which a Teddy Roosevelt-like raccoon/Cavalryman leads a perpetual charge
to eliminate the last two members of a Native American nation who--to their credit--always manage to outwit their White nemeses,
but not without being portrayed as gibberish-spouting savages. Other racial/ethnic groups got their due with characters like
Joe Jitsu and Go-Go Gomez (a generically Asian martial-arts expert and a mustachioed, sombrero-wearing detective) in the "Dick
Tracy Show." Still other characters, like Warner Bros.' Speedy Gonzales, with his lazy, drawlingly drunken Mexican mice buddies,
represent a trend that, even when portrayals of negative Black stereotypes were gradually being considered verboten, similarly
racialized cartoon portrayals were allowed to continue. The ambivalence of these portrayals is obvious when one takes into
consideration that, even though on the whole they are aligned with the "good guys," they still are beset with racial traits
that have long been the mark of negative stereotypes. This helps to establish even further that the behavior, appearance or
speech of the characters is typical of that racial/ethnic group, and biological determinism shows up again.. Thus, with an
extraordinary growth in ready access to America's living rooms, the stereotype becomes even more solidified in the popular
mind.
With the advent of home video players, many theatrical feature films that were rarely
shown on network television are now readily available on tape and DVD. This too is a double-edged sword: some of the more
controversial Disney films, for example, long the subject of debate due to questionable depictions of racial/ethnic groups,
are readily available for rental or purchase; this reintroduces films to new young audiences who otherwise might not see them.
In other words, this new availability gives these films an opportunity to reestablish the White-dominated ideology of racial
superiority over nonwhite peoples, all while under the seemingly benign Disney banner.
Disney, that most family-friendly of entertainment conglomerates, has not, as suggested above, emerged unscathed from charges
of being racially intolerant. A glance back to early Disney features will find several instances of negatively racialized
characterizations. Oft-discussed examples include 1941's Dumbo (where rowdy crows flit around the title character and talk
a very Black-derived jive chatter) to later features like Peter Pan (1953), where a low point is a musical number called "What
Makes the Red Man Red," whose pidgin-English lyrics go:
Once the Injun didn't know/ all the things that
he know now
But the Injun he sure learn a lot/ And it's all from asking "How"
What made the red man red/ Let's go
back a million years/ to the very first Indian Prince
He kiss a maid and start to blush/ and we've all been blushin' since
These portrayals are particularly egregious examples of racial impropriety. Interestingly, although the 1946
feature Song of the South, with its drastically softened master/slave dynamic and its romanticized version of plantation life,
has been pulled from distribution (thanks to pressure from the NAACP and other groups), Disney remains to this day the most
popular purveyor of animated family entertainment. However, they continue to draw fire for their misrepresentations of various
racial/ethnic groups, most recently with regard to portrayal of Arabs in films like Aladdin and Native Americans in Pocahontas
(Faherty). This reiterates the notion that, although it is now no longer considered acceptable to misrepresent Blacks in cartoon
form, other racial/ethnic groups are still fair game (Cohen 68). And because these people are portrayed in negative ways,
the ideology of biological determinism is reinforced once again.
Although there have
been some strides made in recent years with regards to how racial/ethnic groups are portrayed in animation geared toward kids,
there is still much work left to attend to: specifically, in the way that television can affect how we think of other peoples.
In her study, "Television and Prejudice Reduction: When does Television as a Vicarious Experience Make A Difference," author
Sherryl Graves suggests that this sort of ideological indoctrination can come about in two ways: by portrayal (and in the
nature of that portrayal), and by exclusion. As has often been the case with Latinos, Asians and Native Americans, just the
"not being there" can impress the notion that those people are not worthy of portrayal at all, positive or negative. This
can have just as detrimental an effect as a negative stereotype, because highly impressionable children are then unable to
see themselves or their personal experiences reflected in characters in cartoons or in children's TV (Graves 708). Since the
advent of "Sesame Street" and other programs, however, steps have been taken to improve matters by depicting people of different
racial/ethnic groups living alongside each other in perfect harmony. As utopian as this appears, it has been only recently
that topics of racial difference have been discussed in children’s television, with an eye toward changing racial
stereotypes and attitudes toward race. Studies have shown these efforts to have not been in vain: notions of stereotypes and
stereotypical behavior are better understood and acted upon when not avoided, but discussed directly; only in this way can
the ideology behind biological determinism be addressed and undermined. Understanding the processes behind the formation of
prejudices is useful in deciphering the ways in which the hegemony surrounding racial hierarchy, and specifically the domination
of the White ideology, is established and maintained by reproduction and dissemination of racially charged imagery. However,
it is also by methods of exclusion that kids of any given racial/ethnic group can come to see themselves as devalued by the
dominant class; and the effect can be the same, if not worse.
Studies like
Graves' are not totally lost on animators seeking ratings and wishing to avoid controversy, while also wanting to stretch
the limitations of portrayals of nonwhites on TV. There have been several recent cartoon series whose attitudes toward racial/ethnic
differences represent a more even-handed approach: WB's "Jackie Chan Adventures," Disney Channel's "The Proud Family," and
Nickelodeon's "Rocket Power" are good examples. Animators have long found themselves sitting on the fence regarding how to
(and even whether to) portray different racial/ethnic groups in their work. Even if no harm is meant, unless extraordinary
care is taken, harm can come. Although D.W. Griffith's 1915 film "Birth of a Nation" established the visual grammar with which
Blacks (and by extension, all nonwhite people) have been negatively seen in film ever since, it is instructive to listen to
author James Snead when he asserts that, "More than perhaps any genre, animated cartoons encourage the rhetoric of harmlessness"
(Lindvall 134). But, as we have seen, this rhetoric is hardly immune to racial ideology; and in its perceived harmlessness
lies its greatest power.
Works Cited
Cohen, Karl F. Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted
Animators in America. London: McFarland and Co., 1997.
Coover, Gail E. "Television and Social Identity: Race Representation
as 'White' Accommodation." Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. Vol. 43, Issue 3. 2001. p. 413-431.
Faherty,
Vincent E. "Ís the Mouse Sensitive? A Study of Race, Gender and Social Vulnerability in Disney Animated Films." Studies in
Media and Information Literacy Education 1.3 (2001). Online: http://www.utpjournals.com/simile. November 6, 2003.
Graves,
Sherryl Browne. "Television and Prejudice Reduction: When does Television as a Vicarious Experience Make A Difference?" Journal
of Social Issues, Vol.55, No. 4, 1999, pp. 707-725.
Holtzman, Linda. Media Messages: What Film, Television and Popular
Music Teach us about Race, Class, Gender and Sexual Orientation. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000.
Lindvall, Terry and
Ben Fraser. "Darker Shades of Animation: African-American Images in the Warner Bros. Cartoons." Reading the Rabbit: Explorations
in Warner Bros. Animation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Nowlan, Philip and Dick Calkins. "Meeting
the Mongols." The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Robert C. Dille, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1969.
Singer, Marc. "Black Skins and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race." African American Review. Spring 2002,
Vol. 36 Issue 1, p. 107.
Sampson, Henry T. That’s Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960.
London: The Scarecrow Press, 1998.
Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Media Sources
Tokyo Jokio. Animated. Warner Bros., 1943.
Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. Animated. Warner Bros., 1944. Friz Freleng, dir.
Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat.
Animated. Lantz Productions, 1941. Walter Lantz, dir.
Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs. Animated. Warner Bros., 1943.
Bob Clampett, dir.
The Dick Tracy Show. Animated. UPA Productions, 1960. Abe Levitow, dir.
Peter Pan. Animated.
Walt Disney Productions, 1953. Hamilton Luske, et al, dirs.
Dumbo. Animated. Walt Disney Productions, 1941. Ben Sharpsteen,
dir.
Go Go Gophers. Animated. Leonardo/Total Television/CBS-TV. 1966.
copyright 2003 Dean T. Moody
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