Thoughts on the Song of the South (Follow up on The Samurai Frog's post) Part 1 of 2

Song of the South (A follow up to the Samurai Frog’s Essay on the movie)

http://samuraifrog.blogspot.com/2007/12/everything-is-satisfactual-notes-on.html

I had to write a five page paper on The Birth of the Nation. So with that mindset, I was going to write post on the controversial Disney movie Song of the South. However, the Samurai Frog wrote a great post on the subject, which is a far better post than I could ever come up with. So read his post and watch the clips and then come back here to read my thoughts on the subject matter.

I agree that the movie has some artistic value. The animation is breathtaking and life-like, but the live action is somewhat racist. This is set during the post Civil War South. Terrorists groups like the KKK ran through back community and killing people left and right. Fear drove many blacks toward the North to find better jobs and to move away from the KKK. However, Remus doesn’t seem to care about this with his bright eyed grin and singing.

Here we see an Uncle Remus smile big and wide like the old racist comedic routines from the black face characters from old movies. As a black man myself, I cringe every time I see Remus grin with those big eyes. I think the film ends up being racist, but I don’t think they intended for the film to be that way. The grinning and singing older black man that performs for the white children just comes across as bad in today’s light.

Then there is broken English that many of the ‘black’ characters speak in. “That I is.” Besides Uncle Remus, Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Bear, and Br'er Fox used this embarrassing southern slave dialect, in which they all come across as being ignorant. (Side note: James Baskett did the voice of the Fox.) (I spend a lot of time in Memphis because of family, and I do run into some people that talk this way even today. “That I is.”)

End of Part 1