“It’s Racist but Hey, It’s Disney!”

Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood and Corporate Power (2001) is a documentary examining Disney’s corporate power. It challenges the masses’ perceptions about Disney and Disney stories through unveiling the stereotypical representations of race and gender in Disney movies.

Linking to the concept of cultural circuit (Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay & Negus, 1997), the identity of Disney as a company has been created and recreated through the visual representations of childhood fantasies. As a result, Disney has become the ultimate story teller for children around the world. Because the image of Disney is intimately tied with fairytales, the taken-for-granted public knowledge is that anything Disney represents or produces is innocent and safe. It is almost impossible to think of a company that makes movies and toys for children as dangerous or political.

When it comes to Disney products, it is amazing how discriminative parents and teachers are. The gender stereotypes and racial components in Disney movies are often overlooked because the assumption is that young children do not have the cognitive ability to notice and decode the underlying meanings of the visual images presented to them in imaginative forms. In Mickey Mouse Monopoly, Dr. Justin Lewis from Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University points out that the way media affects us is not immediate, but through a subtle and accumulative process. He specifies:

The way media influences the way we think is […] a question of creating certain environment of images we grow up in and that we become used to and after a while those images will begin to shape what we know and what we understand about the world. (Section one: Disney’s Media Dominance, 2001).

Indeed, the power of media is hegemonic. Through presenting and representing images in particular ways, media constructs and sustains a whole set of beliefs and values that essentially become part of our common-sense knowledge. Mickey Mouse Monopoly provides examples of gender representations in Disney movies. The popular female characters such as princesses, fairies, and mermaids are typically slim. They have big eyes, fluttering eyelashes, fair skin, small waists, and big breasts. They talk softly, and move and act gracefully. Over the years, the image of females in Disney movies has not changed much. The characteristics of the popular female roles imply certain values – what kind of body type is mostly appreciated; how beauty is defined; and what behaviours are expected from a “proper lady”.

Racial stereotype is another major theme in Mickey Mouse Monopoly. In Peter Pan, Native Americans are depicted as savages; in The Lion King, Latinos and African Americans are violent street gangs; and in Lady and the Tramp, Asians are illustrated as disloyal and unreliable in the forms of Siamese cats. The most explicitly racist representation has been the opening song of Aladdin, the Arabian Nights:

I come from a land from a very far place, where the caravan camels roam;

Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face.

It’s barbaric but hey, it’s home…

Regardless whether or not the intention was to make the song sound funny, the ignorance and prejudice between the lines are beyond words! Mickey Mouse Monopoly reports that Disney changed part of the lyrics, but still kept the last line “It’s barbaric but hey, it’s home” after Arab-Americans’ furious protest against the humiliating racial stereotype. In respond to that, New York Times’ one words says it all, “It’s racist but hey, it’s Disney!”

As one of the world’s biggest media corporation, Disney has an overwhelming influence on international popular culture. When a dominant Western corporation has the power to represent and circulate stories of other cultures and influence the way that children understand diverse cultures in the world, it really is playing a role of a “media educator” on a global level. This role gives Disney tremendous amount of power, but “with great power, comes great responsibility”. Disney should start to ask itself what kind of stories it is telling to the children around the world, and what kind of messages that the stories convey.

Whether or not Disney takes the responsibilities of educating the young during the processes of constructing childhood culture is a question of concern. There is always a possibility that Disney will be too busy rolling its giant profit snowball and too stubborn to make any positive changes. In that case, parents and educators will have to take on an extremely difficult but absolutely necessary task – learning to understand electronically produced visual representations, and guide children to “read” and think critically about the stories being played on screen by asking them simple questions after viewing (In case you are wondering – Yes, children are capable of critical thinking. And I will share some examples delightedly if you are interested!).

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