Fallon Falore

Christina Ivey

COMM 160

6 November 2018

“The Most Important Sentence”

The focus for my blog post this month is going to revolve around media and its effects on society. Specifically, through Disney movies and their effect on children as they grow up. When you are young, you don’t realize that these movies are teaching us lessons of all kinds. Although not all lessons in Disney movies are necessarily bad, there is definitely an imbalance of positive to negative lessons that children grow up learning. This is due to the overwhelming amount of discrimination throughout each one of Disney’s movies. A few of the discriminatory aspects that the movies cover are racism in Dumbo and sexism within Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid.

According to Dictionary.com, Racism is when “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior”. As much as we hate to see it, Disney movies are covered in racist themes in the characters that easily go over any child's head. According to ScreenRant, a youtube film, the 1941 film Dumbo showed racist themes in the characters. The black crows resembled members of the African American culture and the stereotypes around the culture. They resembled the stereotypes in this culture by giving the crows heavy accents, making them jazz singers, and having them smoke. Moreover, the main crow was named “Jim Crow,” after the state and local laws that reinforce segregation. As you start watching disney movies when you get older or looking back on them, these motifs were hidden behind the joy and song. Often times media gets a reaction from the people, but you wouldn’t expect such negative reactions from a children's movies that made us so happy growing up. Since, children are unaware of these life lessons, they see them as normal.

One aspect of Disney movies that has become a completely normal thought within children's minds are they sexist remarks and values. Girls and boys grow up seeing how they should act through the media that they watch. In movies like Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, gender roles are shown in a completely harsh way. In Beauty and the Beast we see Gaston as they ideal man. We see girls flaunting at him and he is expected to be the strongest, smartest, manliest man there is. This is teaching young boys that they cannot be vulnerable or weak, they have to be one way in order to be wanted by the ladies. This is reinforced again in the music, as well as through his sidekick, Lefou, who wants to be just like him. Lefou is also short, chunky, ugly, and just the assistant to the man. In The Little Mermaid we see Ariel giving up her voice in exchange for legs, so that she will be able to fall in love with this guy. This is teaching young girls that they should give up everything for a guy and do what it takes to get the guy. This is reinforced in a majority of the songs that play throughout The Little Mermaid. This teaches our children to grow up stressing over how they should act and what gender roles they should follow. However our children should not be thinking of these things, they should be living life to the fullest and wondering who their next play date is going to be with.

This is the most important concept to me because I find it insanely crazy that we can have adults making movies and tv shows for children and not realizing the pressure they are putting on them or the thoughts they are putting in their heads. Where kids see lessons of love, adults see racism and sexism. These aspects easily go over the children's head, but they don’t realize that the constant viewing of these stereotypes is being normalized in their brain. With that kind of power, I would hope that directors of all kind would use it to spread lessons on compassion, kindness, respect, and all the other amazing qualities that the human race has to offer.