Song of the South is Racist, Terrible
I have vague memories of seeing Song of the South as a child, some time before it was buried it in the molten metal at the earth’s core, deep beneath the Disney Vault, never to be seen or spoken of ever again.
It’s entirely possible I didn’t see Song of the South in its entirety, but rather sanitized bits and pieces, most likely on the Disney Channel as a child. With trademark guile, cunning and cynical calculation, Disney surgically extracted “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”, the Oscar-winning song introduced in the film, and threw out everything else as hopelessly dated, racist and problematic.
When Disney+ promised to truly open up the fabled Disney Vault and unleash the greatest streaming service the world has ever known folks speculated about whether or not that meant that Song of the South would finally be released legally.
I wrote a blog post arguing that Disney should let the world experience Song of the South in all of its ugliness and wrongness as a way of taking away its awful power. As is often the case, I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
I went into Song of the South thinking, “How bad and racist can it be? It’s Disney after all.” Three minutes in I was appropriately mortified and convinced that Disney had no choice but to bury a deeply embarrassing portrayal of the Reconstruction South as a racial utopia where whites and blacks lived in total peace and harmony and nothing, but nothing, could keep everyone of African descent from grinning from ear to ear in joyous appreciation of life’s incredible bounty.
On a scale of 1 to 10 Song of the South consistently scores somewhere between 13 and 14 on the “racist stereotypes” scale.
You know how there will be a scene or a line in a classic Disney movie that makes you sit up and think, “Holy shit was America racist in the 1940s and boy oh boy did Disney reflect that racism?” Song of the South is nothing but those scenes. It’s not a little problematic: it’s indefensible.
“Yessuh” is the first word uttered by James Baskett’s endlessly benevolent Uncle Remus, preceded by the belly laugh of a man without a care in the world and nothing but joy and humor in his happy soul.
Speaking in a manner no Disney hero would ever communicate in again, Remus continues, “There's other ways of learning about the behind feet of a mule than getting kicked by them. Sho as I'm named Remus. And just cause these tales about critters like Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, that don't mean they ain’t the same like can happen to folks. So them what can't learn from a tale about critters, just ain't got they ears tuned for listening.”
Though he was not nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor, Baskett received an Honorary Oscar for his performance, making him the first black man to win an Academy Award for acting.
Baskett delivers a rich, complete, soulful performance of what is essentially a racist white fantasy of infinite black benevolence in the face of white cruelty.
Uncle Remus exists to serve kindly white people however he can, whether that means working on the plantation or spinning yarns designed to impart lessons in addition to entertaining.
He’s joy personified, a perpetually smiling, chuckling plantation griot without a care in his heart or a worry on his mind. Uncle Remus reflects the seductive power of soft racism, of bigotry rooted less in a paranoid, reactionary conception of minorities as dangerous criminals than a need to see minorities in secondary roles as clowns, sidekicks or servants.
Uncle Remus has exclusively positive characteristics. He’s friendly and warm, loyal and true, a wonderful man and a friend to children everywhere. That’s the problem; he’s nothing but Christ-like selflessness wedded to folksy homespun wisdom and an insultingly cartoonish approximation of the African American vernacular. Remus has no agency or desires beyond a passionate need to use his gift of storytelling for good.
One of the many things that makes Song of the South a disaster from start to finish is that it’s not really Uncle Remus’ story even though he’s far and away its most compelling element.
Instead Song of the South tells the infinite blander, whiter tale of fancy lad Johnny (tragic Disney child star Bobby Driscoll, who met an early demise unfortunate even by former kiddie icon standards), a lace-wearing seven-year-old from Atlanta who travels with his mother and father to the family plantation.
Johnny is inconsolable when his father has to go back to Atlanta until he befriends Uncle Remus and a black child his own age and the older man regales them with colorful, racist yarns involving Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Fox, all of whom sound more like characters from Amos and Andy than typical Disney funny animals, in no small part because all are voiced by alum from the infamous radio show, including Baskett.
Song of the South laughably depicts the South following a bloody war to end slavery as a place where poor black laborers and their wealthy white employers speak to one another with the intimacy and ease of best friends despite being from different generations.
Instead of focussing on Uncle Remus’ remarkable resilience Song of the South relegates him to the background so that it can focus on white nonsense involving Johnny trying to save a cute dog from getting straight up murdered by some white bullies and Johnny befriending an annoying little girl named Ginny Favers.
The boy’s parents and grandmother humor Uncle Remus because he’s such a powerful force for good in the universe but Johnny’s mother eventually loses patience with the sweet-natured storyteller and tells him he’s not to tell her impressionable little prince any more of his fanciful stories.
Since Remus’ whole existence revolves around spinning yarns for dumb little white children, he departs the plantation, a horrible mistake, of course, considering what an untouched paradise it is for former slaves and former slave-holders alike and a despondent Johnny foolishly cuts through a bull pasture to look for his much older best friend.
In an appropriately overwrought climax, a distraught Johnny goes to look for Uncle Remus and is hit by a bull in a sequence that I honestly found way more hilarious than the filmmakers intended.
While obnoxious little Johnny hovers on the very brink of death Uncle Remus harnesses his Magical Negro powers and brings him back to the land of the living through storytelling and friendship.
Disney’s need to soften and romanticize our country’s past has never felt more poisonously dishonest or toxic. Song of the South was honestly way more racist and filled with unapologetic, appalling stereotypes than its reputation for being racist and filled with regressive caricatures would suggest.
But it’s also a shockingly deficient piece of entertainment. Song of the South is shitty because it’s racist, of course, with an understanding of race rooted in the era the Uncle Remus stories were first published rather than when the film was made, but it’s also terrible to the point of being unwatchable on its own merits.
For a Disney movie shot by Gregg Toland, the cinematographer of Citizen Kane, Song of the South doesn’t even look good. It’s garish in its colors and shockingly undistinguished in its animation.
Song of the South doesn’t work on any level, except perhaps as a nostalgic fantasy for racist revisionists who want to believe that the racial history of the antebellum and reconstruction South was one of friendship, love, song, storytelling and solidarity rather than violence and oppression.
I expected Song of the South to be racist. I didn’t expect it to suck so damn hard.
When Disney understandably decided to not release The Song of the South on Disney+, CEO Bob Iger said that even with a "outdated cultural depictions” disclaimer, the film was "not appropriate in today's world.”
That’s definitely true but it was true when the film was made as well. Song of the South never should have been made and while I’m glad I finally suffered through it for the sake of an appropriately dramatic conclusion to Wild Disney Animation Month, it’s probably a good thing people can’t see it because nobody really should see it, except for historical reasons and/or to see if it lives up to its reputation as the biggest and ugliest skeleton in Disney’s outsized closet. It does!
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