I’m not sure that’s necessary, honestly. As a lot of folks have mentioned, I’d say a lot of people don’t even know the full movie exists anymore, or even care. They might ride Splash Mountain and wonder where these characters came from, but they’ll probably just decide they’re from some old cartoon short and not think about it much. I don’t think Disney has to involve itself in complex apologetics for a film that’s not even available through them (or really even worthwhile, for that matter). All it will do is stir up anger at this point. Maybe better to just let it fade into obscurity as a crappy product of another time.
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And Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Eubie Blake and Anita Boyer! I hadn’t seen that, what a find.
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This one’s fun too.
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That’s likely because we already had that discussion, nearly two weeks ago.
Weird, isn’t it?
Y’know, I’m getting good and goddamned tired of hearing how not supporting historically racist shit is somehow “unfair” to people who helped enable and facilitate both systemic and individual racism.
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I’m just tired of middle-aged white guys claiming their childhood memories of a movie they never saw are being stolen, and lamenting that their children won’t be able to see the movie (which, again, they never saw). Same goes for those shedding crocodile tears about a piece of film history being erased. Their real intent is so obvious it’s cringe-inducing.
I’m sure I saw the movie as a child, but it made less impression on me than the sub-par 1970s Disney animated features (which is to say, none at all). I learned the folk tales through books, and the only thing most people remember about these movies is the oft-parodied “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” song.
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I’m not sure how familiar with the Lost Cause concept you are. But it was not so much a movement, particularly during a Harris’s life that one could be in support of. But a host of claims, political ideas, and cultural trends that coalesced into a fixed ideology largely after Chandler. And it’s not neo-confederacy or anti-reformation, not entirely. It’s the idea that the Civil War was primarily about defending a mythologized Southern “way of life”, along with states rights, and the associated host of ideas about that Southern culture and society.
In terms of the cultural end of that. The ideas of what that Southern heritage was, what society supposed looked like, and the dripping nostalgia for a time that never was. The Uncle Remus tails are a ur text. They’re part of the root stock it was all based on. What others looked to, referenced and used as proof for a unified Southern, white culture that others wanted to dismiss and destroy. That exists, and happened, and people still explicitly reference Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit along with Southern Hospitality and idyllic scenes of drinking sweet tea (a product of the 80’s) on plantation porches as emblematic of said Southern way of life.
And if you’re teaching Harris or Uncle Remus without reference to that, you aren’t really teaching either. But this is largely a subject relating to Uncle Remus not Harris’s work on the whole and his place as a Southern journalist straddling the war. It’s irregardless of his other writings. But importantly the guy supported the Confederacy during the war, even as he was a New South proponent after and had fairly positive (if paternal) feelings about blacks the whole way.
And that’s exactly the meat grinder that lead to The Lost Cause. That tension. How do you defend the Confederacy in the aftermath of the Civil War? How do you reconcile support for the Confederacy when its white supremacist root has been exposed and society is moving on? How do you have pride in family who fought and your home town when they were so clearly wrong? The Lost Cause grew out of the various attempts to do all that. And writers like Harris, through works like the Uncle Remus tales, provided the happy, nostalgic, mass market take on plantation life to root it all in. The concept wouldn’t be fully formed until the last years of his life. And wouldn’t become the dominant read on the civil war till the 10’s and 20’s after he was dead.
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Yeah, it’s interesting to see how many of the rides at Disneyland have really taken on a life of their own and come to surpass their original source material in many ways. I’ll bet that Mr. Toad’s wild ride has been ridden many more times and by more people than the original Disney “Wind in the Willows” short was ever watched. Doubly so for the Matterhorn Bobsleds, which was inspired by the 1959 movie “The Third Man on the Mountain.”
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Best Disneyland dark ride ever: beer, explosions, getting hit by a train, going to Hell.
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I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t think to (yet again!) plug this one. A great collection, thanks for mentioning it!
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I’m pretty sick of the way it’s become an automatic smug response to every time Disney farts. You can just look at comment sections for any article on the streaming service and there are 100 identical posts saying “what about Song of the South”. Its become a troll shibboleth. I even ran into an asshole friend of a friend at a bachelor party and when Disney+ came up he busted out Song of the South with a shit eating grin on his face. Cause its super clever and funny to throw out that bomb. It was pretty clear his only familiarity came from memes and internet listacles.
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I had forgotten all about that one!
The times I’ve gone to Disneyland, I’ve wondered how many kids have any idea about “Swiss Family Robinson” as they climb around the treehouse, or that Davy Crockett was a very big deal when Frontierland opened. The Mike Fink Keelboats were there up through the 90s, and he isn’t exactly a household name these days.
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The goal post is moving here. I am claiming that it’s wrong to say that Harris opposed Reconstruction. I am saying that reading his Uncle Remus stuff alongside Chesnutt is productive (you get to see tensions representation and ideology, some which, yes, is nostalgia, but nostalgia’s not exactly simple). I never said that Harris was not racist, nor defended his other work. I also didn’t say that Harris’s work wasn’t used in support of the Lost Cause. I said it didn’t support it.
I know it’s annoying when some jackass trots out an “it’s complicated” on something like this. But my objection comes out of conversations with colleagues in the history department at the HBCU where I teach. The history of our institution, and of the people who have supported and undermined it, sometimes both at once, is full of contradiction and nuance. I honestly need to get back to work, but I really want this point to get across. I guess you could think of what I’m trying to say in terms of George Wallace or Lyndon Johnson, and/or people like Bayard Rustin. Some people help despite themselves, or hurt despite themselves, or do good that is vast outweighed by the evil.
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This seems like it needs a timely repost:
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My specific claim is that it’s unfair to say Harris opposed Reconstruction when he opposed it. I also claim that his stories can be usefully read with Charles Chesnutt’s stories. This is not an off-the-wall claim. Most of the stuff I can point to is paywalled, but there’s an article from the Johns Hopkins African American Review that’s available. Note that I’m not specifically endorsing that essay’s argument; I’m just point out that my position that Harris’s work is more interesting/nuanced than “happy lost cause pseudo-antebellum” makes it sound, well it isn’t that outrageous.
To be clear, though, I’m not defending Lost Cause nostalgia, nor racism, nor lynching. I’m not worried about Harris’s legacy, or anyone’s feelings getting hurt because of something Neil Young sung.
Show me where I said he opposed the Reformation. I said during as in coinciding with. I didn’t move a goal post, you got a little straw man going.
More over I’m talking about the work and not Harris in general.
The podcast talks about how the film came out when there were rightward swings in the US. So, early 70s with the backlash against civil rights gains, and then again in the early 80s (or 1980?) with Reagan.
If I want to watch things of questionable content for people darker than me I will go with those or anything starring Mantan Moreland who from what I understand was making more than the white actors in the lead roles.
And this one because Halloween.
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Fuck. “during the Counter Reformation.” My bad. I absolutely mistook your point/words there.
I think read past your words to a “wording” congenial to my counter-argument. I’m copping to a straw man, but asking forgiveness, as it was unintentional.
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Aye; if I wanted to go 'racially offensive 'in the other direction, punching up as opposed to punching down, there’s this film, which coincidentally is also VERY loosely based upon the Brer Rabbit folklore:
Though obviously containing extremely incendiary content, it has a veritable cult following in the Black community, and a ‘fresh rating’ of 79% on RT.
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