Disney—the once-great corporation that was universally admired in the 1950s and 1960s is today deliberately working to help fuel racism amongst our most innocent citizens—young children. A recent production of Disney’s “The Proud Family” put forth yet another false narrative about our nation’s history—that only Black slaves “built this nation” and that Blacks today deserve reparations “for every moment we spend submerged in this systemic prejudice, racism, and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.” To illustrate this last point, the cartoon showcases a picture of a young Black man with his palms turned up and the words “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” written on them. The film features predominately Black girls angrily denouncing the Founding Fathers and at one point shows the presidential images on Mount Rushmore being replaced with the likes of Harriett Tubman, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass—the “real” champions of freedom. Lincoln is deliberately snubbed as the girls proclaim “we can only free ourselves …. emancipation was not freedom.” No context, of course, is supplied for these outlandish charges—thus exposing the cartoon for the racist propaganda that it is.
Disney has certainly declined from the company that virtually every home was tuned in to watch in television’s formative years. In earlier times, Disney regularly featured wholesome, patriotic portrayals of America’s past that influenced generations of children. Recently, however, it has worked diligently to promote the Leftist goal to “fundamentally change America.” One executive producer has admitted she deliberately infused gay-lifestyle themes into as many productions as possible. Disney’s Diversity and Inclusion Manager, Vivian Ware, led the effort to ditch the words ladies, gentlemen, boys, and girls in its theme parks in order to not alienate transgender children. The company has already pulled or posted warning labels to old movie favorites such as Dumbo, Peter Pan, Aristocats, Swiss Family Robinson, and Song of the South for their being deemed offensive to minorities. It fired the conservative star of Mandalorian, Gina Carano, for posting to a social media site her criticism of attacks upon Republicans. Secretly recorded Critical Race Theory trainings for Disney staff have blamed all whites for systemic racism and instructed them to never “question or debate Black colleagues’ lived experience.” Disney’s white employees were also asked to complete a “white privilege checklist” with such qualifiers as “I am a man,” “I still identify as the gender I was born in,” and “I have never been raped.” Upon discovering this, Chris Rufo rightly argued that “the Magi Kingdom is a house of lies” because it has used slave and child labor, filmed “Mulan” near Uighur concentration camps, and censored its content for the Chinese Communist Party.
But it’s much worse than this. Disney’s latest attempt to fundamentally change America shows the company’s diabolical nature. The Proud Family episode deliberately distorts our nation’s history. The fact that slavery was universal among cultures is ignored. There is no mention of the fact that North African and Ottoman Muslims enslaved millions of white Europeans for over 1,000 years. Children are intentionally left with the notion that only Black slaves “built this country.” Children are not informed that both Hinton Helper and Alexis de Tocqueville offered plenty of evidence that slavery—far from being responsible for all the nation’s wealth—actually retarded the South’s economic progress and development. There is no mention of the exploitation of Irish immigrants in the nation’s coal mines and in the construction of our railroads and canals. Apparently, the white farm girls who worked 13 hours daily in the Lowell Mills, the Chinese coolie laborers who built the Central Pacific Railroad, the immigrant miners who worked 364 days a year in the PA coal mines, the striking workers who were machine-gunned in 1914 at Ludlow, Colorado, and countless other examples of exploited non-Black victims who helped build this nation played no role in creating our nation’s prosperity. Nor can we forgive Disney for helping to inflame the racial hatred and violence that currently engulfs America. The cartoon’s attempt to reaffirm the lie surrounding the George Floyd case by promoting the phrase “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” in the cartoon is unpardonable.
Far from succeeding in its goal of indoctrinating America’s children to the necessity of imposing racial reparations on the nation, Disney has only succeeded in showing how its militant cartoon characters are ignorant of real history. Disney intentionally promotes the falsehood that Black men are routinely shot down by police while trying to surrender with the cartoon’s ‘hands up’ scene. Meanwhile, the cartoon’s promotion of Nat Turner—a murderer who slew his master and his wife while they were sleeping in their bed at night and who ordered their infant child to be slaughtered in his crib—is a sad commentary of what passes today as acceptable viewing for children. Disney’s producers apparently didn’t know that Turner’s men decapitated the infant in its crib and threw its body into the fireplace. Nor that two other children were later beheaded. Nor that almost all of Turner’s victims were defenseless, unarmed women and children. And, according to Disney, this is the man who should be depicted on Mount Rushmore?
Let’s not give Disney the benefit of the doubt here. The company has a litany of researchers and historians at its disposal who could give caution to its deliberate dissemination of racial bias and falsehood. These deliberate distortions of history and racial animus—far from bringing us closer together as a people— only serve to further divide us into ethnic and racial tribes. These falsehoods lead to the assassination of police officers, an increase in racially inspired hate crimes, and countless break-ins and robberies of businesses throughout the nation as “oppressed” individuals seek the ‘reparations’ they deserve.
Disney should apologize for its promotion of a murderer of children to an audience of children in the vague hope that we’ll somehow have better race relations in the future.
Word Count 989
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Jack Bovee
Fort Myers, FL
The writer has been a social studies educator, founder of Rho Kappa--the National Social Studies Honor Society--past president of the Florida Council for the Social Studies, and a former Elementary School Principal of the Year in Lee County, Florida. He may be reached at: jsbovee@aol.com.
Email: JSBOVEE@aol.com
