crossposted from Womanist Musings
As the mother of two little guys, I have spent countless hours watching cartoons. Some have made me laugh and smile, while others have left me with countless moments of reflection. I recently suffered through The Bee Movie with Mayhem and Destruction.
Isn’t Barry the Bee the cutest thing you have seen in a long time? Well Barry is not only cute, he is about making a change.
“A recent college graduate, Barry wants more out of life than the inevitable career that awaits him, and every other worker in the New Hive City – a job at Honex…making honey. Barry jumps at the chance to venture out of the hive, and soon encounters a world beyond his wildest dreams. When Barry inadvertently meets a quirky florist names Vanessa (Renee Zellweger), he breaks one of the cardinal rules of beedom – he talks to her. A friendship soon develops, and Barry gets a guided crash course in the ways of the human race. When he shockingly discovers that anyone can just buy honey right off the grocery store shelf, he realizes that his true calling is to stop this injustice and set the world right by suing the human race for stealing the bees’ precious honey.”
From this little synopsis it would seem that children would gain a lot of positives from viewing this movie. They would learn about the need to stand up for personal beliefs, the interdependency cycle of the environment, as well as the importance of agency and autonomy. Not bad for a DreamWorks flick…That is until you realize that what they mean by human is white. That is right, all of the main characters that are not bees are white.
Making POC invisible even in the imaginary world of cartoons is racism. Why should my 7 year old not be able to see himself reflected and understood as human? The very idea that Bee is suing all of humanity, should mean that various races, creeds, religions, sexualities and abilities receive equal representation.
The idea that able bodied heterosexual white people constitute humanity erases the experiences of many, and this is the invisible message that comes along with our little friend Barry. Shame on you DreamWorks, though I must admit that I am not all surprised. I am sure that they felt that using the voice of Chris Rock to portray a character was enough, but when POC are so visibly absent what does the presence of one POC indicate but tokenism?
Daily cartoons like this teach our children what people they should value. Whiteness as a representative model, and the erasure of bodies of colour is a common theme in media. It has become so normalized that we rarely question why these bodies are missing. If POC are only represented as “ghetto” (see Chris Rock character) does that not encourage the idea that a race hierarchy is normal and natural?
Jerry Seinfeld is the creator of this little innocuous flick. This man has a history of ignoring POC, or using them as the punch line in a joke. On his smash hit Seinfeld, there were only two recurring characters that were black – the lawyer and the owner of the coffee shop that they visited. It can therefore come as no surprise that when he turned his attention to children’s media, he continued this trend. If presenting white people as the main focus can “work” on the small screen, of course it should translate well to the big screen.
Lest we forget, we can also credit him with publicly coming to the support of Michael Richards on the David Letterman show, after his famous racist attack. Yeah, my buddy is a good guy and didn’t really mean all of the racist shit that he said.
White parents want their white kids to see positive representations of them. Whiteness as good is an important message that must be reinforced if the white supremacist state is to be maintained. I am tired of spending my hard earned money in the support of white supremacy. My body matters, and so do the bodies of my children. Barry may have been concerned about humans stealing, but I am more troubled by the idea that certain bodies don’t count as human.
I so hear you on this!
I am so tired of movies for kids that don’t feature POC. Even a movie like Cars, with few people, is filled with stereotypes. All the characters are “white” (even though they’re blue and red and green, etc) except for Cheech Marin the jacked-up Ramone and Jenifer Lewis as a racialized Caddy. Grr.
Disney movies on Disney seem to do a pretty decent job of this, surprisingly. I usually hate Disney, but they’re pretty good, at least on their made for TV movies.
I will quibble on one point. You wrote, “White parents want their white kids to see positive representations of them.” Part of white privilege is that white parents don’t ever have to think about this (as you well know), never mind want it, for this to happen. This is giving them too much credit for actually thinking about things like this.
I agree with your point but, there were main characters that were POC in the movie, the judge, voiced by Oprah Winfery and the Honey employee that he duels with.
Another subset of this is where there is a group including POC and/or females, the white guy is the “leader”. I’m thinking of especially the superhero genre on TV, such as “Power Rangers” or even PBS’ “SuperWhy” (other than this, PBS generally does a better job of avoiding the “White people are the default humans or leaders” thing).
Ms four, I feel you on the “Cars” thing. This is my son’s favorite movie, and I think he has seen it about 100 times (I’m not kidding).
I wish I had a solution to this. The “we should make our own movies so we can control the content” idea really doesn’t work with animation (either computer or hand-drawn), due to the high costs.
Wanderinglady, yeah, my kids love Cars too. They got it as a present. They’d watch it every day if they could.
Even when the American media machine portrays racial minorities in the USA, it will usually be in contrived stereotypical roles that are unthreatening to the White status quo.
Witness, Disney’s idiotic _Samurai Girl_.
http://www.racialicious.com/2008/09/10/samurai-girl-premieres/
The bottom line is that the American media (like all US institutions) serves the interests and worldview of White America–this despite US propaganda about “celebrating diversity.”
Ultimately, non-White people will have to start repudiating this US media system and building their own.
I don’t worry too much about completely non-human cartoons as children don’t notice who the actors are and therefore won’t notice race unless it is in a completely stereotypical way which is worse than no representation at all. I must admit that for myself with Cars that I thought Sheriff was played by a black actor (something about that deep voice and grandfatherly way).
My pet peeve is Sci-Fi. I love sci-fi shows but their representation of POC makes me crazy. If I was actually “that kind of person” I would show up at some Comic Con convention just to ask the question “How come every main POC character is a space alien?” And believe me it has crossed my mind to do it! Both Stargates and Star Trek (TNG, Enterprise).
The only good thing is that it has given me the chance to share my pet peeve with friends who would never notice this and give them something to think about.
Pingback: Link Love First Edition: An Introduction To My Favorite Reads « Unconventional Origins
Whaa? Uhuru? Sulu? The blind guy on TNG? Preacher in Firefly? All non-white, all human…
But what’s the right solution? Should there be some racial proration of characters in every work of fiction?
Derek, somehow I left out the sentence about how the original Star Trek was years ahead of its time and its a shame that science fiction didn’t follow that trend. Sulu and Uhuru were very dramatic for their time. As was the interracial kiss.
And I admit that I haven’t seen Firefly. I am thinking more of Worf, Teal’c, B’Elanna Torres, Ronon Dex, Teyla.
I don’t know what the right solution is but the cast shouldn’t come across as “oops, quick we need diversity, add an alien.”
I watched the Bee movie, and as far as I remember there were african american human characters, and they actually had the most flattering roles. For instance, one of the human judges was black. I do not really think the Bee movie was about white people per se, it seemed to be about Jewish people (as most of Seinfeld’s jokes are). For instance, they kept asking the Bee if he is dating someone “beeish”. I think just like black people are allowed to make black jokes, obviously Jewish comedians make jokes about us the Jewish people. I think it would be hateful and anti-semitic to call Jewish people racist, have not we had enough of suffering…so I am not here to defend Jewish people per se, or even to defend Seinfeld. I am just pointing out that just like “I think I love my wife” is a comedy movie about black peopel, the “bee movie” is a comedy on the life of beeish people. I Also felt that the fact that the black guy was a judge, a serious intellectual, send a positive message to kids
I just checked, and the judge is actually played by none othe but Oprah Winfrey herself! I think this speaks for itself that Oprah would not agree to take part in a prject that had escluded black people and had an element of racism.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/steven_rea/20071102_Bee_Movie_flies.html
It makes me wonder if the mom who made the original post actually payed attention to the movie at all.
I am a white mother of a white child, and I’m highly disturbed by the inability to find movies for my child (now 3) that feature POC as main characters (and don’t focus on that as the plot of the story).
Lilo and Stitch has been something pretty great for us, but she’s an orphan – which is a theme repeating itself over and over in kids movies, and I’d like something where the parents stick around.
Other than this, I am at a loss for resources and just wanted to post that I am growing sick of this too.
As a white person working in animated tv/films I have to say this is a double-edged sword.
I have been on animated films/shows where the characters are non-humans (like Cars) or animals–and the casts are VERY diverse.
But in those cases, since you cannot depict the “race” of a car or a dog, it’s difficult for the viewer to identify the ethnicity of a character until the writers resort to stereotypical dialogue/characterizations.
In these cases, some POC feel they are not being represented (though if they saw the faces of the actors they would see they were incorrect) and when the dialogue gets too “ethnic,” some get upset that it becomes stereotypical.
I have worked on cartoons by African-American, Asian & Hispanic creators and ALL of them have developed characters & written dialogue that could easily be pegged as “racial.”
As a previous poster stated, it’s more “OK” for members of a particular group to portray that group in a way that would be frowned upon by outsiders.
Trust me, the creators of animated shows struggle with these issues constantly–and progress is being made–it may be slow going, but let’s all be glad that’s happening at all.