Thursday, December 15, 2016

Is Disney Racist?


Many children in this generation grew up on Disney princess films, learning how to wish upon a star and make friends with cute woodland creatures.

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However, as the world becomes more integrated, and Disney becomes a larger and larger societal force, especially among children, Disney should be careful to portray races and cultures in a truthful and non-biased way.
Disney did attempt to represent other races and cultures in its princess line with Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Mulan. However, if we look closer at their films, we can see that although Disney tried to represent minorities in its films, the end results are superficial at best. Minorities are still inaccurately represented in Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1998) through blatant stereotypes.
Aladdin is the worst. It was produced during the Gulf War in the early 1990s, when Arab sentiment was strong, so the film bases its characters off Middle Eastern stereotypes, whether consciously done or not.
Critics such as Dianne MacLeod notice that although all the characters are recognizable as Middle Eastern, Aladdin and Jasmine have American face structures and accents whereas minor characters and evil characters have stereotypical Middle Eastern features and foreign accents. Aladdin and Jasmine have small noses, whereas the palace guards have large noses and dark beards. Jafar’s features are even more extreme, which embodies the Western caricatures of the baddies of the time, Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini.
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Pushing Middle Eastern characteristics onto evil characters promotes the idea that American-looking and American-sounding people are good, while Middle Eastern-looking and foreign-sounding people are evil.
(Let's not forget to mention the ignorance that is Jasmine's outfit. She's clothed in a stereotypical Arabian looking harem pant set. That's right. A harem pant set. I have a feeling an Arabian princess would be more covered up. Talk about sexualizing a woman based on a misinformed stereotype. Check out an article that ranks 14 Disney princesses--where Jasmine is at the top of the list because of her "vaguely exotic" vibes. Yuck.)
After their faux pas with Aladdin, Disney made a conscious effort to right their wrongs in their next film, Pocahontas. According to Eve Benhamou, Disney researched the story and hired historians and Native American consultants to make Pocahontas as accurate as possible. Benhamou claims that this research helped Disney break away from the traditional Western stereotype of the teepees and elaborate headdresses of the Plains Indians and more realistically portray the lifestyle of the Algonquian tribe, such as growing corn and living in wooden shelters.
However, other critics point out that beyond those cosmetic fixes, Disney’s research otherwise did not help. Amy Cappiccie, Janice Chadha, Muh Bi Lin, and Frank Snyder claim that Pocahontas’s Barbie-like figure and short, falsely Algonquian dress, with a slit up the side of her leg, sexualizes and idolizes her. They claim that she is portrayed in the stereotype of the “Noble Savage—a once-great but now conquered culture that was integrally connected to the earth and could commune with nature” (54). In other words, this image is one that idolizes Native Americans, therefore othering them from the norm.
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While I agree that this image of Pocahontas idolizes her and fits her into the “Noble Savage” stereotype, I don’t agree that it’s a bad thing. I believe that the portrayal compliments her and her tribe, applauding their natural lifestyle and contrasting them to the materialistic goals of Governor Ratcliffe and the white settlers—essentially praising native culture and criticizing Western culture.
…and at least the portrayal of Native Americans in Pocahontas is better than in Peter Pan. Check out this article to read more about Disney’s unfortunately more blunt racism.
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However, I don’t like the fact that the white settlers call the natives “savages” so often. I understand that historically, white settlers did refer to natives that way, but, like Pauline Turner Strong put it, calling a Native American “savage” is like calling an African American “nigger.” You just can’t do that. Plus, such repetition cements in children’s minds that it’s okay to call someone such an offensive term.
Mulan improves a little from Pocahontas, in that it doesn’t use any offensive terms regarding Asian people, but stereotypes are still very present in the film.
While Mulan was fairly accurate architecture- and cultural-wise, they slacked in the character department. I noticed that many characters had the stereotypical slanted slit eyes, short stature, and either a super-lanky or fat body type. Furthermore, like in Aladdin, the more insignificant or traditionally Chinese the character was, the more stereotypical they looked; the more significant the character, the less Asian and more American they looked.
For example, traditional characters such as the Emperor and Grandma all have very small, slanted eyes, and insignificant characters such as the ladies who get Mulan ready for the matchmaker also have absurdly tiny and slanted eyes.
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In contrast, Mulan and Shang have relatively larger eyes, although still small compared to other princes and princesses, as if the only trait that makes a character Asian is the size and angle of their eyes.
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In terms of body type, insignificant characters have either very round or very thin body shapes, whereas significant ones have the ideal American body-type. Mulan’s three soldier friends are great examples: Chien-Po is fat, Ling is lanky, and although Yao is supposedly muscular, he is still depicted as short and squat. Even Mulan’s mother and grandmother are also round in figure.
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Again, Mulan and Shang, as the main characters, break this pattern and fit into the ideal American beauty standard. Mulan is thin but athletic, and Shang has broad shoulders and a built body.
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Although Disney probably did not intentionally paint their characters with stereotypes, this just shows that these false images are already ingrained in Western society so much that people don’t realize the harm that they incur on minorities. Disney should be more aware of the stereotypes they portray to prevent future normalization of false images.
These inaccurate representations have negative impacts on children, mostly enforcing white privilege and offensive stereotypes. According to Dorothy Hurley, children need to see themselves reflected in literature and media to build a positive self-image. However, seeing their culture portrayed as inferior to American culture is very discouraging and sometimes offensive and can dampen self-image.
Check out this Asian American blogger’s story about her experience watching Mulan as a child.
Disney’s widespread popularity only makes it a more urgent issue for Disney to accurately depict minorities, or children will grow up with a false image of the people around them, and children of color will continue to be marginalized in society.
Thankfully, people nowadays recognize the importance of accurate representation of minorities. (Read about the Internet's response to a rumor that the cast of live-action Mulan was going to be all white.)


But remember, that’s what Disney thought when it first introduced Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Mulan, yet their films were still ridden with false stereotypes. It is up to us to make sure that Disney takes the right steps toward a more just representation of minorities in its future films.




References:
 Cappiccie, Amy, Janice Chadha, Muh Bi Lin, and Frank Snyder. "Using Critical Race Theory to Analyze How Disney Constructs Diversity: A Construct for the Baccalaureate Human Behavior in the Social Environment Curriculum." Journal of Teaching in Social Work 32.1 (2012):46-61. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 1 Nov. 2016.
 MacLeod, Dianne Sachko. "The Politics of Vision: Disney, Aladdin, and the Gulf War." The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2003. 179-92. Print.
 Hurley, Dorothy L. "Seeing White: Children of Color and the Disney Fairy Tale Princess." The Journal of Negro Education 74.3 (2005): 221-32. JSTOR. Web. 1 Nov. 2016.
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