Disney's Most Notorious Film (27 page)

One of the central premises of whiteness is its own self-effacement—by extension, it also then denies political agency to nonwhite racial groups. The only instances of race that conservatives acknowledge are its most extreme iterations (e.g.,
Coonskin
and the debates it sparked). Such moments include acts of racially motivated violence, or the use of racially derogatory words, where the material effects of racial difference become impossible to ignore. The irony of such instances is that they do not create space for dialogue on racial tensions in the United States, as Bakshi learned in the mid-1970s. Rather, it forecloses discussion by marginalizing the most extreme offenders as examples of “true” racism. Meanwhile, a subtler, but more pervasive and no less disturbing, racism is allowed to go on uncontested and even unnoticed, as the popularity of
Song of the South
suggested.

In an earlier work on race, nostalgia, and populist media representations of Detroit,
³²
I articulated possible differentiations in the forms whiteness can take when people responded to racial representations in the media. For one, there was the overt “reactionary” whiteness that serves as a blatant display of hatred toward another race. Both progressives and conservatives would identify this kind of discrimination as racist behavior, though the latter would be inclined to argue that it serves as an exception that proves the rule (i.e., white people are not otherwise racist). Yet there is also the subtler, elusive form of whiteness, which is less interested in attacking minorities or in explicitly asserting white privilege. Instead, it focuses on deflecting questions of race entirely, an “
everyday
,
evasive whiteness
.”
³³
It is this form of whiteness with which
Song of the South
’s reception generally aligns during and beyond the 1980s. Yet, as in the case of Reagan’s policies, such denial works in support of institutional racism far better than do explicitly racist forms of whiteness.
By avoiding its own racialization, Reaganism actively seeks to deny
any
awareness of racial difference—an awareness necessary to effect any meaningful social change. The reception of
Song of the South
in the 1980s, far more than in earlier periods, responded to the controversies of the film’s stereotypes through this discourse of evasive whiteness.

In one of the more intense instances, disagreements emerged over a planned early-1981 screening of
Song of the South
at the Fox Venice Theatre in Southern California. As with
Coonskin
, the debate was as much between different groups of liberal activists as between progressives and conservatives. While one newspaper called the film “fascist” and linked it to the Ku Klux Klan and racially motivated murders in the recent news, another group said that such hyperbole was counterproductive at best. The latter organization, ironically, was the one to call for a boycott in the first place, citing what it identified as
Song of the South
’s more “
‘Mickey Mouse’ pernicious [form of] racist” representation.
³⁴
Playing on a double meaning with the cultural use of “Mickey Mouse” as a derogatory term for the trivial, their argument was that the film was a more subtle, mundane form of offense than a movie like
Birth of a Nation
, which deliberately played on extreme racist stereotypes.

And therein lay some of the key contradictions in mounting a coherent critique of
Song of the South
in the 1980s. The film became so outdated that its offensiveness was hard for some to see. This was complicated by the fact that any discussion of “race” within criticism was often met with a harsh rebuttal. Sometimes even that rebuttal came from other liberals and African Americans, who were apparently exhausted by the question of racist representations in Hollywood films. This was highlighted after an activist, Ron Finney, wrote an editorial criticizing
Song of the South
in the
Los Angeles Times
in 1981. In contrast to 1946, D. A. Young, a self-described “white liberal,” responded in a letter to the editor, “I am increasingly dismayed by the racially nit-picking pronouncements of ‘black leaders’ such as Ron Finney. ‘
Song of the South
’ movies [
sic
] are not the problem . . . [in] our society [with] the so-called ‘black image.’
”
³⁵
Young’s “liberal” status may be questionable given that ultimately the letter seems to blame blacks for their own problems. Young believed that time was better spent helping the African American community than in criticizing movies. Also responding to Finney, Mary Coates had a similar take on the efficacy of such criticism. She claimed that, as a black woman, it was “people like Finney who will retard our growth as people.”
³⁶
Both critiques suggested that the film was not significant to the larger material issues involving African American
progress.
They missed, however, that the problem with
Song of the South
was not how it negatively affected African American audiences directly, but rather how it reaffirmed institutional racism and white privilege for white and black audiences.

Disney’s film was and is exactly that sort of subtle, everyday, evasive racism that circulates uncontested because it’s not explicitly offensive enough for most people to appreciate why so many objected for so long. It perpetuates racist stereotypes under a fantastical affective veil of goodwill and harmony. The heated responses to
Coonskin
laid the groundwork for a completely backward, but very real, cultural logic of whiteness that would become ubiquitous in discussions of race in the 1980s—according to this viewpoint, the most racist thing one could do was to acknowledge race as an issue in society. For example,
Song of the South
itself is always a narrative representation of African Americans in the imaginary Old South, and of racial relations in a deeply controversial place and time in American history. Yet only in pointing out this otherwise-obvious fact does a criticism of the film suddenly become “racial,” as if race does not exist in a film entirely focused on a (former) slave serving the logistical and emotional needs of a rich white child.

REAGAN AND THE 1980 RERELEASE OF
SONG OF THE SOUTH

Song of the South
’s third rerelease, only eight years after its second, both reflected and reactivated these deeply conservative attitudes toward race. Meanwhile, the connection between
Song of the South
and the emergence of Reagan’s successful political career resonated with conservative commentators as well as progressive audiences. Several articles in the early 1980s explicitly tied
Song of the South
to the incoming Reagan administration. Days after the first set of responses appeared to Finney’s article, another person wrote to criticize. But the author conflated Finney’s article with others that he attacked for supporting affirmative action. David C. Phillips wrote that collectively these articles “offered one of the best composite defenses for business-as-usual under equal employment opportunity and affirmative action.”
³⁷
Phillips stated his situation as a white Protestant male who had been unable to find steady employment for a year and a half. He expressed frustration that he was not entitled to what he saw as the same benefits African Americans received:

It
seems that “fair employment” is not really fair! Nor does “equal opportunity” give us all similar opportunities. It also seems “affirmative action” assumes employers are branded guilty of racial bias and discriminating practices, until proven innocent! All this, apparently, under the current laws!

How do I spell relief? On Nov. 4, 1980, I spelled it “GOP”!
³⁸

While not explicitly addressing the Disney film’s merits, Phillips tied the heated
Los Angeles Times
debates over
Song of the South
caused by Finney’s op-ed directly to other political issues such as affirmative action. Moreover, he explicitly related that personal frustration with progressives to his own decision to support Republicans in the upcoming election. A vote for Reagan was posited here as a direct reaction against the same civil rights movement that also criticized
Song of the South
’s racist depictions of African Americans.

Liberals also tied
Song of the South
’s return to Reagan’s ascendance. In “Eyes Shut, Clock Unwound,” Haynes Johnson mockingly described the theatrical presence of rereleased older titles in the 1980s. He specifically cited the return of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Dial M for Murder
(1954) and
Song of the South
. Disney’s film, he noted sarcastically, “will take us back ‘to the laughing place.’
Song of the South
features the wise sayings of a darky named Uncle Remus and his animal friends.” In his article, Johnson focused on the larger shift toward nostalgia for the distant past, while also tying this trend in with overall movements of the period: “All of America, it seems, is preparing for a step back into the supposedly more innocent past—and appears eager to get there as fast as possible. The other day an aide to one of the Republicans who will assume new power in the Senate, thanks to the election outcome signaling the advent of the new political era, was talking about the promise of the Reagan presidency and what it means for the country. We’re going back to the
’
50s, this person said, and it will be great.”
³⁹
Song of the South
was rereleased at a time when Reagan’s election as president, and the shift he signaled from the liberal policies of the 1970s, was very much on people’s minds. The connection was supported by the link between Walt and Reagan, two California conservatives who were friends (and friendly witnesses to HUAC). The washed-up actor himself even cohosted the live broadcast of Disneyland’s opening in 1955.

For Johnson,
Song of the South
came to stand in for the 1950s, rather
than
the earlier decade in which the film was originally released. Johnson argued that the senator’s aide was deeply misguided in his perception of the past, reading the fifties as a simpler time of prosperity, peace, and uniformity. Johnson pointed to the period’s myriad problems: sexual repression, racial tension, character assassination, a sudden awareness of the Mafia, the Korean War, and more general conditions of fear during the cold war. The arguments Johnson laid out here anticipate the political theses he would later outline in two of his more well-known books,
Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years
and
The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism
. Johnson argued that “it was the ’50s that saw the beginning of the Civil Rights revolution that would transform much of American life: building since the Civil War, the inevitable Civil Rights confrontation between the federal government and the states occurred in September of 1957, in Little Rock—and it was the ’50s that saw racial violence stain the land in the aftermath of the Freedom Marches and burning of buses in the South. . . . Some model of normality to wish to recapture and relive 30 years later.” Johnson would know, since he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for covering the racial conflicts between blacks and whites in Selma, Alabama. Johnson’s historical anecdote reaffirmed how the 1980s appeal of the “darky” Uncle Remus was symptomatic of a culturally conservative desire to return to a simpler time. “Good times,” he wrote sarcastically, “take it away. Happy days are here again.”
⁴⁰
This political longing was explicitly foregrounded with Reagan’s election.

Johnson’s reaction to
Song of the South
was hardly unique. A particularly interesting case study in the relationship between Reaganism, memory, history, and whiteness was activated by the return of
Song of the South
to Venice Beach, California, in March 1981. More a revival house than first-run venue, the Venice Theatre specialized in showing classic Hollywood films. There were at least two groups of activists working against
Song of the South
’s planned release in Venice—the Anti-Racism Coalition itself and the
Venice Beachhead
’s sympathetic coverage of the protests. The coalition itself was backed by the
Beachhead
, which called the film “fascist” in one headline. The newspaper’s polemic also posited
Song of the South
’s rerelease in the context of Reagan’s election. Without offering any evidence as to why they felt the connection existed between Disney and then president-elect Reagan, the paper’s writers nonetheless believed that “Walt Disney Studios is celebrating Ronald Reagan’s election by re-releasing
Song of the South
as their contribution to the resurgence of the right wing. At a time when the Ku Klux Klan has reemerged
in California and in North Carolina to kill people in the streets in broad daylight, at a time when Black children are being murdered in Buffalo, Atlanta and Oakland, the Fox Venice has scheduled
Song of the South
.”
⁴¹
This community action was more aggressive and harsh in its protest of
Song of the South
’s showing than anything written in the
Los Angeles Times
. Their rhetoric seemed to be a continuation of the 1970s, when organizations such as CORE regularly targeted racist representations of minorities in Hollywood films (e.g., the
Coonskin
controversy).

The
Beachhead
article on the protests began by asking its readership rhetorically if parents should take their kids to a “
‘children’s movie,’ in which Black people are slaves, are shown to be happy working all day and singing all night, in which they are portrayed as grown children, never angry at their condition of enforced dependency or at the whites who rule them, and in which they are filled with love for those who oppress them? . . . Should you let your children be exposed to these vicious and harmful racist ideas and images in this film?”
⁴²
The article then announced a call for action, asking people to boycott the film and join a picket line outside the theater.
⁴³
The newspaper’s coverage of
Song of the South
’s boycott was not short on hyperbole. Even the Anti-Racism Coalition itself later wrote in to contest the publication’s version of events. The paper’s hard-line position was restated further in the article: