LittleKittyMarie
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2011
- Messages
- 908
From a newspaper article from 2007, Is Song of the South too racist to screen?:
"Back in the day, Song of the South might conceivably have been read as a warm-hearted salute to America's 'coloureds'. Since then it's become a shameful embarrassment for the company, the equivalent of a racist old relation who can't be introduced to polite company. In depicting a (literally) fabulous Deep South strung sometime between slavery and Reconstruction, the film trades in a dubious form of myth-making - implying that African-Americans stuck below the Mason-Dixon line were a cheerful bunch who liked nothing better than going fishing, spinning tall tales and looking after white folks' kids.
"When he's not waxing lyrical about 'tar babies', Uncle Remus explains why he likes 'Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Days .... Dat's the kinda day when you can't open yo mouf without a song jumpin' right out of it.' Thus Song of the South reheats the old canard about how slaves can't really be so miserable because, my, just listen to them sing in that cottonfield.
"Annoyingly this cosy misconception had already been nailed by Frederick Douglass way back in the 19th-century. 'I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness,' Douglass wrote. 'It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.'"
"Back in the day, Song of the South might conceivably have been read as a warm-hearted salute to America's 'coloureds'. Since then it's become a shameful embarrassment for the company, the equivalent of a racist old relation who can't be introduced to polite company. In depicting a (literally) fabulous Deep South strung sometime between slavery and Reconstruction, the film trades in a dubious form of myth-making - implying that African-Americans stuck below the Mason-Dixon line were a cheerful bunch who liked nothing better than going fishing, spinning tall tales and looking after white folks' kids.
"When he's not waxing lyrical about 'tar babies', Uncle Remus explains why he likes 'Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Days .... Dat's the kinda day when you can't open yo mouf without a song jumpin' right out of it.' Thus Song of the South reheats the old canard about how slaves can't really be so miserable because, my, just listen to them sing in that cottonfield.
"Annoyingly this cosy misconception had already been nailed by Frederick Douglass way back in the 19th-century. 'I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness,' Douglass wrote. 'It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.'"
