Hmm...

I've bemoaned Disney's presentation of femininity and relationships in the past, but this is something I've never considered: Disney's teachings of masculinity to little boys are just as problematic.

Disney Doing What It Does Best.

Dealing with problems of race ambiguously at best, not dealing with them at all at worst, right? Wrong. I'm used to Disney ignoring racial issues. Even being marginally racist at times (going back in history there's all kinds of animalization of black peoples--the baboons in The Jungle Book, the crows in Dumbo, etc., and don't even get me started on everything that's wrong with Aladdin). So evidently, in an effort to combat these issues in the company's past, or maybe just riding along on this recent American wave of post-racialism/colorblindness, Disney has now chosen to IGNORE AMERICAN HISTORY COMPLETELY and mark the struggles of African-American soldiers (like my paternal grandfather, a decorated WWII veteran) entirely irrelevant. Great choice.

What am I talking about, you ask? I had the night off from work tonight, so I decided to go see Captain America with K and a couple other friends. [No major spoilers coming up, I pinkie promise.] We trudge along through America's involvement in WWII, from the volunteer army to the Uncle Sam posters and the war bonds...then suddenly we're in Italy facing the 50 or so members of the 107th infantry who didn't get captured by the evil Germans...and there are Black and Asian faces intermingled with the White guys. Huh? Hold up. Wait just one goddamn minute. No they didn't... 

Dear Disney, the United States Armed Forces were not integrated until President Linden Johnson's Executive Order in 1948. During the second World War, African-American soldiers were segregated into their own troops, who were rarely sent to battle, and if so sent into zones considered too dangerous for their white counterparts. They were grunt workers, easily disposable. Their officers were not widely respected, their men treated with more respect by civilians abroad than by their own countrymen. Do I need to bring up the Tuskegee Airmen? (Don't even get me started on Tuskegee in general!) I don't care how many billions of dollars your company is worth; I don't give a shit how much easier it is to cast your movie without regard to race; if you thought it didn't matter, it does. I will not stand by and let the honor of my grandfather and the thousands of African-American men like him who had to fight for the right to fight for their country, and came home to find no honor, no love, no respect, and certainly no veteran's benefits like the GI bill (which could have singlehandedly erased the Black-White wealth gap, had Black veterans been given the opportunity right to go to college or purchase homes as were their White counterparts) be trampled upon. In the same way I cannot tolerate history textbooks that relegate Blacks', womens', or LGBT-persons' histories to colorful boxes and side notes, if they mention them at all, I cannot and will not tolerate you erasing the struggles these men endured. I cannot and will not sit idly by while you piss all over their legacy.

Aren't there people whose job it is to make sure you don't do anything blatantly ignorant like this? Shouldn't someone be checking these things when you're casting? Doesn't anyone care? Minor historical inaccuracies like the details of a uniform or the use of a car that didn't exist yet don't bother me; I realize that it's not actually possible to travel back into time and get everything perfect. But we're not talking about something minor like that. We are talking about the struggle for basic human dignity endured by my father's father, Black peoples of his generation, of previous generations, and to an extent even of today's generation. We are talking about civil rights. We are talking about the way the media likes to subtly cover up the sordid details of our nation's past and pretend everything is all hunky-dory. 

Captain America can't be shown as fighting for an America that actively denied its citizens the very "inalienable truths" it was founded on, huh? That's not gonna sell tickets. Disney, I love you, but this is not okay.   

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge--Day 18: Letter to a Disney Character

Dear Princesses/Heroines,

I have had bones to pick with you before about all the impossible notions of love you gave me and how angry I was at you because I would never find anything like that in the real world and you ruined the concept for me. You ran around all happy and free once you'd found your respective princes and made me feel like that level of carefreeness was unattainable. And then I found something that was a temporary real-life equivalent. Temporary being the key word there. And I've realized I have a whole new bone to pick with you: none of you ever taught me how to say that this attempt at finding love has failed and it is time to move on with my life.

Let me show you what I mean:

• Ariel, I will start with you because you know you're my favorite. Your love interest was of a different species than you. I don't even want to think about how you were possibly sexually compatible. He also lived in a world you couldn't visit by being yourself, nor could you ever bring him down to dinner with your parents. Your father hated him. You had to sell your voice to a witch to get a doomed chance to be with him. He couldn't tell you were you without your voice--did you ever question what had he really fallen for? You watched him fall under a spell and almost marry someone else. 
• Belle, you're up next in the bestiality theme. Your prince was actually a monster, and you fell for him anyway--though that might be better known as Stockholm Syndrome. You saw his true colors or some shit, Idk. He was really just a big fluffy ol' teddy bear. Whatever. He also held you prisoner and was entirely dependent upon you without showing any affection for a very long time, and I'm concerned by your lack of concern about any of this.
• Sleeping Beauty, just...does the practically necrophilia not bother you at all?
• Cinderella, you knew him for approximately an hour. Couldn't he have just been a great guy you met, someone to keep in mind for your next lifetime? How could you know he was worth leaving your [albeit terrible] family for? 
• Nala, he abandoned you and everyone and everything you have ever known because a somewhat scary uncle yelled at him. He was selfish and cared only about himself for years. He didn't even want to help until a crazy monkey called on his dead father's spirit to shake some sense into him. And yet you still expected him to save you and married him and had a kid? Idk how those trust issues were ever ironed out.
• Mulan, besides sheer sexiness and the ability to be a leader, the only thing your man has going for you is that he left you in the snow on the side of a mountain to die rather than killing you himself...after you saved his life in an act of pure recklessness that I cannot condone. Then, when you manage not only to save yourself, but to SAVE THE ENTIRE REPUBLIC OF CHINA, he tries to apologize for your actions to the emperor rather than let you accept your praise. And then when he shows up at your parents' house it's like none of that ever happened?
• Jasmine, okay, so he saved you from having your hand chopped off in the marketplace and you guys had a moment in his hovel. Don't forget that he then thought you were too shallow to ever accept him for who he was so pretended to be a pompous asshole prince to win you like real love was supposed to be a game. He then inadvertently gives power to your father's evil vizier and nearly gets your entire city destroyed. Sure in an act of wit and deception he fixes it all in the end, but...who did he think you were and how did you let him get away with it?
• Meg, your job was to find a way to kill him and instead you almost killed yourself for him. Some wires got crossed somewhere. And let's not forget that you sold your soul to Hades himself to get your first love out of some trouble and then he ran off with some bimbo.
• Pocahontas, he came here ignorant as fuck and hell-bent on destroying your land and livelihood. So of course, the obvious thing to do is try to teach him what he doesn't know and then throw yourself onto the chopping block to stop your father from killing him.

 I think you get my point, ladies. I'm not so sure I should be jealous of these stories anymore. In fact, I think I'm a little worried about emotional abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. It has been hard for me to admit, as I get older, that you all may not be a girl's best role model, especially once she has become a woman with grown-woman's shit to deal with. I want to know why none of you ever gave up. I feel like I'm supposed to think it's because you're strong women who know what they want, but I'm beginning to think you might have been scared. Or, to paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, you're just written that way. 
 I want to tell you something you may have never heard before, ladies...you deserve less damaging stories than that. It's not always meant to be. And I'm sorry it's too late for you to take this advice, but I can learn from it too, so here goes: don't be afraid to let a love go and try again with someone new and interesting when he comes along. Be free. Be a bad-ass independent woman. Find someone who can show you new worlds and make you feel like a Queen and give you heartfelt gifts and maybe even take a crazy risk or two for you, yes, but also find someone you can be real with and who is real with you. Someone who doesn't need changing or require that you give up some great part of yourself. Find a story that is comfortable and easy and won't make anyone cringe along the way. You're the only person you need to give a third chance (seconds are more flexible). Find someone who respects you and your background and gives you some freedom. And remember that only a man that gives you the best of himself deserves the best of you.

I still love you though, and I hope you're happy in whatever-after you ended up in.

Maya    

Reblogged from Sociological Images

If There's a Prize for Rotten Judgment...

Sigh. It's been really hard for me to focus all day. And I feel like it's not going to get any better unless I get this out of my head: it's his birthday today. Yes, him--the him who managed to bring my world crashing down around me twice in 3 years, first by walking out of my life and second by inviting himself back in. He who really just the sight of his name has reduced me to a Fistful of Tears. He who I've known for all 20 of my years. Today he's 20 too. He's exactly two and a half weeks younger than me, you see. Our Moms used to joke that we should have a joint birthday party, since it would save them money and we did everything else together anyway.

I hate that today is the day after yesterday--it's like the Universe plays this cruel trick on my where I can never unlink the two.

Last April, after two and a half years, he made a Facebook to find me and sent me a message that literally made my knees give out and sent me crashing down into my chair. It was a Friday afternoon and I was instantly crying and trying not to let my mascara run because I had Spanish 108 in about ten minutes. He wanted to talk. He wanted me back. It took a lot of soul-searching and friend-conferring and determination not to scream and (this was a fail) not to cry before I called him. We talked for almost two hours, a lot of it me being stronger than I'd known I could and firmly saying that we could be friends, but too much had happened for us to be anything more; we weren't the people we were then.  My roommate congratulated me, but that night I couldn't sleep; I just felt so empty. I wound up sneaking out into the living room curling up in the window seat and sobbing so hard I woke her up and then screamed at her when she came to console me.

The next day I spent hours and hours listening to Ne-yo's "Do You" on repeat, wondering if my decision had been a mistake too. I messaged him back and said that maybe I'd been wrong and obviously I wasn't comfortable with my decision and maybe we should try and he said no, that I'd been right and he wasn't right for me anymore. He said we could still be friends. And then he deleted the Facebook he'd made to find me and I haven't heard from him again.

I deleted his number after a few months, trying to reclose that chapter of my life.

Facebook still had it. Wasn't that hard to find.

I know it's a bad idea, but I really want to contact him before the day is over. Now that I can, I want to wish him a Happy Birthday. And it's not just because of yesterday--it's not! I promise. I really meant it when I said I wanted him to stay a part of my life, that I wanted us to be friends. And it really hurt me when he took that as an opportunity to walk back out of my life again. So I shouldn't even be considering giving him the chance to come back in, right?

Meg's song from Hercules seems appropriate here:

"If there's a prize for rotten judgment, I guess I've already won that. No man is worth the aggravation...it's ancient history--been there, done that. (Who you think you kiddin, he's the Earth and Heaven to ya; try to keep it hidden, honey we can see right through ya... *insert all the words I've forgotten here* I thought my heart had learned its lesson; it feels so good when you start out. My head is screamin get a grip, girl, unless you're dying to cry your heart out..."

Frog Doesn't Flop (Princess and the Frog **SPOILER ALERT**)

Okay, so I've seen the new Disney Princess movie, The Princess and the Frog, in theaters twice in the past two weeks, and now I feel comfortable responding to all the criticisms that havee been surrounding it. 

I'll start by saying the truth: As excited as the little girl inside me was for there to finally be a princess who looked like her--note that that's not "who she could relate to", because, albeit not on the same level, I could identify with Belle the book-lover, Ariel who wanted to explore new worlds, and Jasmine who felt trapped just like me--the adult me concerned about the betterment of her race as a whole was skeptical of this film. Having a sun-kissed Princess by the name of Tiana couldn't just be making a movie--in the production of this film, Disney was making a statement, and the whole world knew it and viewed it just as such. That statement could either be the biggest step Disney as a company has ever made towards correcting the negative, racist, and stereotypical images of blackness it has promoted in the past (the hyenas in the Lion King are violent and unintelligent [and all voiced by blacks and Latinos]; the crows in Dumbo wore pimp hats; the monkeys from The Jungle Book wanted to be "real people"; and, expanding this to people of color in general, neither Pocohantas or Mulan were real princesses [meaning they didn't marry Princes]) orrrrrrrr it could go horribly wrong and be just another greivance to add to the list.  And even though the movie didn't come out til last month, this New York Times article about the film came out way back in May, and really just substantiated my qualms about the progress this movie was really going to make.

But, scared as aI was, I absolutely HAD to go see the movie. I mean, I was raised on Disney--all the girls in my generation were. These movies are my childhood. So after promising my best friend that I wouldn't analyze it to death after we saw it, over Winter Break I journeyed to the theater amongst throngs of little girls clutching Princess Tiana dolls and saw the film for the first time. Andddddddd.....**drumroll please** I LOVED it! My critical eye wavered and I was just as enchanted by the film as I had been by Disney movies in my VHS player as a child. Sure, she had to go through some shit, but she got both her man and her dream in the end, and I was thrilled.


But enough about initial reactions. Once I got back to school, my Women's Center offered the opportunity to take a free trip to go see the film and discuss it afterwards, and I jumped on that as an opportunity to take a really critical view of the film since that desire failed so epically the first time around. And now, after seeing it twice, once for just pure entertainment value and once trying to analyze how good a job Disney really did, this is what I think:


The opening scene when Tiana's mother is reading the story of the Frog Prince to her charge, Charlotte, and Tiana, paints a rather interesting view of femininity differences between the races (or maybe the classses?) In my mind, at least, the upper class white girl with all the fancy dresses would be against the idea of kissing a frog, and the lower-class black girl wouldn't have such a hoity-toity attitude about it. But Disney switched these predictable roles, having Charlotte start practically drooling over the prospect of kissing a frog if it meant she'd get to marry a prince, and Tiana wrinkle her nose at the idea. This is rather obviously a ploy to get the audience to identify with Tiana, as the majority of us probably wouldn't go around kissing frogs just in case either, but the role reversal is still interesting. From the get-go, Tiana did not have a sorry beggars-can't-be-choosers attitude, and we can tell she's going to be a woman of strong values and with a very determined personality, while we are a bit concerned about Charlotte's gross materialism and the hissy fits she throws to get her way. 


After a long train ride home to the decidedly poor section of town, Tiana and her mother are joined by her father--YES, YOU HEARD ME RIGHT, THIS IS A TWO PARENT BLACK HOME--to make dinner, which they share with the community, and Tiana is tucked into bed. The promotion of the idea of a stable, even if not particularly affluent, black family in the mainstream media like this is absolutely wonderful, and really made my heart just sing.


Oh, and speaking of singing, Tiana sings too. She's not that different from the strong-willed songbird princesses that come before her...


The movie goes through how Tiana grows up to work two jobs trying to save enough money to build the restaurant she and her father always dreamed of. Her peers tease her for working too hard, and it is evident that she doesn't have very friends. At first glance this social ostricization seems very troublesome, but going back through Disney history, we see the same thing happening to Belle for liking to read, and it could even be argued to be present in films where the heroine is banished or her  only friends are woodland creatures, such as Sleeping Beauty. Also, there is no one in Tiana's life who truly supports her following this dream of hers, but again, this is not new: Mulan's father does not believe she can go to war in his place, Cinderella's stepmother does not believe she can go to the ball, King Triton does not believe Ariel should have any desire to go to the world above, and just like Tiana's mother, The Sultan believes Jasmine should be concerned with nothing more than getting married, and this is the main concern of Mulan's matchmakers, who believe that a good marriage is the only way a woman can honor her family. 


And then, **fanfare** Prince Naveen arrives! Now I've heard two major complaints about him. First off, he isn't "black enough". He's too light-skinned to be a brotha and too dark to be a white man, voiced by a Brazillian...this is a man of ambiguous race. But my question is: what person of African descent in this country ISN'T of ambiguous descent?! Our family histories get lost when you go back before the Emancipation Proclamation, so how do any of us know "how black" we areally are, as ridiculous a concept as this measurement of blackness may be? Some people ask, well, why couldn't he have been an African prince? Why does he have to be from this made up land of Maldonia? To these people, I say, well, check your history, honey. Sure, Naveen is from nowhere recognizable, but you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find a Prince from a known land. This isn't the first time Disney has made up a location for a movie to be set or a Prince to be from: Aladdin's Agrabah doesn't actually exist, and even in that movie when he arrives in town with all the fanfare the Genie has provided him and is pretending to be a Prince, he makes up a kingdom name to please Jafar off the top of his head; the land of Genovia that the Princess Diaries both I and II are set in was made up, Ariel hails from the mythical land of Atlantica, and Prince Eric's kingodom goes unnamed, as do the kingdoms in Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast, among others. In fact, the only Disney films I can come up with that do feature real locations don't involves Princes or Princesses: Pocohantas, Mulan, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Thus, I have decided that this is a classic Disney trope, and this movie cannot be faulted for it. I hold that Naveen is meant to represent an everyman, as opposed to being nothing at all.

Many people also pick at the rampant use of dialect in this film, claiming that it makes the characters seem less intelligent. I think the critics must just be grasping at straws here, because Ray the firefly, arguably the most Cajun of all the characters, also speaks French and writes out his name--he is obviously an intelligent character. Mama Odie has a much more common, wise, aged knowledge of the workings of the world, and passes that knowledge on to Tiana, Naveen, and Louis, rather than simply giving them the answers because she knows the most valueable form of knowledge is that which you learn yourself. 


And people complain about the voodoo that runs wild in this film as well. In response to them, I say that most of the classic Disney Princess movies have magical villians. For a film set in New Orleans, a "Shadow Man" is kin to Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent, Aladdin's Jafar, or the Little Mermaid's Ursula. Voodoo is historically the magic of choice in New Orleans. The fact that Mama Odie is also a practicer of voodoo is also matched by the Genie in Aladdin, the Fairy Godmother in Cinderlla, and the Blue Fairy in Pinnochio. 


There's only one real criticism that I can see basis for: the fact that Tiana seems to change Naveen for the better simply by the force of him loving her. This could send very negative ideas into young girls' minds that they could change a man in the same way. But I argue a) that this is not the first time Disney has propulgated this idea (note how Belle softens the Beast's rough attitude and Nala tames Simba's carefree attitude to get him to come back and save his pride), and b) it is just as possible that simply being out in the real world for the first time, entirely changing his setting and way of life, is what changed Naveen's perspective on life, falling in love with Tiana just being something that happened along the way.



By the end of the movie, we are even left with a positive image of Charlotte, who would postpone her dream of marrying a prince in order to salvage her friend's (but are they really friends?) happiness, and left with the very positive image of Tiana paying for the restaurant with her own money and having her dream and her man all of her own accord. 


I say kudos, Disney--this is an epic win. But I'm interested in hearing what other people think, soooo let me know! Agreements? Arguments for the other side? 


-Dada Chiku