Written by Logan Hickey
At the time of taking this Lit 61R I am taking history of Animation, which has some very interesting crossover between them. Through this blog post I am going to look at the early ages of animation and other mass media and how this affected the public’s perception on race for years to come. The most obvious of this genre of blackface minstrelsy’s heavy use and how it is borrowed in the early animation industry as the first set of country renown icons. This form of entertainment dates back deep into the slave holding roots of the american people, and pulls symbols and caricatures directly from that time period. The characters of Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny were all based off of the stage performances of the era that came before them, when blackface ruled. The era unadulterated racist animations may have been filtered out going into the late 50s, the symbols that the characters represent of a dark past still stayed, and do today.
These characters affected generations and generations of Americans, even after the animations became loss overt in its connections to live minstrelsy, the amount of grotesque cartoons and the characters that starred in them remained as structures of a once far more obvious link. American’s alive during that time that grew up watching these animations will permanently have a demeaning outlook placed in their subconscious that continues to undermine the African Americans struggle to be taken more serious by the general American Public, when in the streets life is the hardest for their sector.
Hundreds of years of demeaning outlooks on an entire section of people in a country, even when hidden under the surface and with the older generation still have lasting impacts on the generations in the future. The structure of racism stay lie deep within the society of America as a whole. To this extent, African Americans have been attacked by media for the entire 20th century. It is evident that the public’s opinion was effected and had no rally for change going into the 90s, and the way the mass media portrayed them gives some good insight into why the public had not rallied for their aid.
Nicholas Sammond: Birth of an Industry, Duke University Press 2015
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