Thread by @thearmchaircom

So I’m going to share some of by banned/censored cartoon stuff with y’all. This thread will contain clips and stuff so be warned. I don’t know why I’m going this but somehow my brain is here so that’s where we’re going tonight until I get too creeped or tired to keep on.

So you might be asking, “Why is she into this? That’s a weird hobby.” IT IS.

I have Whoopi Goldberg to thank. There was a contest and of Hollywood Squares who said this was his hobby and she told him to look up Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs.

I was in high school at the time and it sparked an interest for me. This was before YouTube and I spent a LOOONG time looking for this cartoon (beyond descriptions) online.

This is the version of it that’s on YT rn. I’m goi f to comb through my files and see if I have it all.

Looking for Coal Black, I ran into something I didn’t realized even existed: racism in cartoons.

This stuff was so normalized that I didn’t even know what I was looking at. The cartoon below was a case and point (Twitter limits video length so this is all I got).

I watched the cartoon above COUNTLESS times as a kid. It is one of the “Censored Eleven” (along with Coal Black), but somehow it made it onto a VHS called 18 of the Greatest Cartoons. I had this tape as a kid. Watched the heck out of it.

What gets me is how normalized it is in cartoons. There is a website that I frequently read. Just going through the different titles and reading the edits that people recorded over the years. Lots of blackface gags.

This is a cartoon that I remember seeing frequently as a kid, though parts of the scene were cut.

The title is “Southern Fried Rabbit”

This is one that you will have to search for to see in its entirety. But it is just like “Hey, we’re going to glamorize slavery and act like it’s all cool. No problem.”

“Wholly Smoke” wasn’t banned, in fact, they played the black and white version of it quite a bit on Nickelodeon but with several edits. You’ll see some blackface (the matches were originally black) and other ratchetness.

It wasn’t just Warner Brothers that was on racism. Here’s a clip from a wartime Popeye cartoon called “You’re a sap, Mr. J**” (the name contains a slur that I’m not going to type)

Sorry for duplicate tweets. I realized that I didn’t have some of these clips in the thread.

Anyway. As we can see from some of the cartoons above, even when the co tent of some of these cartoons was intended to communicate “positive” messages, they didn’t do it without racism.

This is my last clip for the night.

I think that a lot of us are familiar with this scene from Lady and the Tramp. But if you aren’t, here you go.

Something that makes me mad is that I had to sing this song in music class in elementary school. It turns my stomach.

So I was going to be done, but I’m not hon go to be done for a second.

Some of the cartoons that we grew up on (kids who were kids in the 90s especially), morphed over time with edits. Some of those edits were for certain types of violent content, which is interesting.

In the early 00s, Cartoon Network (who had the rights to the WB cartoons at the time) started discontinuing a lot of cartoons, or only playing them at night. They did this not only with racist cartoons, but also with ethnic stereotypes. So that meant no Speedy or Scottish guy.

They also shelved PePe Le Pew for awhile. I need to look it up because I’m not remembering off the top of my head, but I think some of that had to do with the Iraq war and less about the ethnic stereotypes.

Hi! I’m back on my stuff this morning as a procrastinator sermon preparation.

So I haven’t even tapped very deeply into these cartoons casual use of minstrelsy and blackface.

I touched on some of the general ethnic stereotypes that were in cartoons.

There is soooo much gross stuff everywhere. It wasn’t just one studio or one set of cartoons.

One glaring omission that I (intentionally) made was Tom and Jerry because I didn’t have the clips (or the strength) to go into it.

I actually think that Tom and Jerry normalized racism in ways that were so subtle that most people don’t recognize it.

I know that there were likely *some* edits to Tom and Jerry over the years (mostly *obvious* blackface gags)...

But I remember watching Tom and Jerry as a young adult in the 00s and there still being stuff that was blatant and obvious that hadn’t been redacted.

So some people might argue with me on this, but here is a subtle example of the normalization I’m talking about. The song “Is you is pretty is you ain’t my baby” in Tom and Jerry.

I say that people might argue with me because this song was performed (and presumably written) by a Black man. First of all, it’s important to know that Black people took part in minstrelsy (which this technically isn’t I thin but anyway). Doesn’t make it less of a problem.

It’s the use of Black vernacular for entertainment purposes for me. It’s the decontextualization of Black English for me.

I actually didn’t know this song existed until a few years ago when I made a post that jokingly referred to “is you is or is you ain’t” as an AA proverb.

The number of white people who jumped into my comments talmbout Tom and Jerry and me shook. Like that was their *only* frame of reference for this saying.

Meanwhile my mom used to say that to me ALLLLLL the time growing up.

Y’all, this stuff is even in Winnie the Pooh!

I watched this cartoon all the time as a kid. I remember the first time I watched it as an adult. I was shaken to my core. The gag here is SUBTLE (hint: it’s in how Pooh answers, listen to his inflection).

And of course, when I pointed this out on Zucc’s Book of Faces, white folks tried to tell me that I wasn’t seeing what I can see and hear with my own senses, and what I had been studying for over a decade at that point. Because whiteness. Anyway.

So you might be asking at this point, “Why does any of this matter and why is she actually SHOWING clips if they’re so racist.”

Great question!

This is one case that I believe that it is important to *see* in order to fully understand the impact.

I am normally not okay with people engaging in “trauma tourism” but this is an exception, because people don’t understand the subtlety, issues, ans impact until they actually *see* it.

I also think that it’s important for people to see how normalized this stuff is. I hope that people start to make the connections that when we say that stuff is racist, it’s often because of stuff like this that is seemingly innocent. There are tropes.

People don’t seem to get it when we try to tell people that stuff is racist today. Like I’m not talking about stuff from this era, but just racist stuff in general.

They don’t get the subtlety with which a lot of racism operates.

People think that racism has to be the Klan or calling n words and that’s not it. It’s subtle crap that is normalized that is just gross and wrong.

There are so many people who would get so mad about being “PC” if we were to comment on or try to “take away” certain cartoons today (in reality they do it still. People are BIG MAD about Disney + content warnings).

Also, this is what we mean when. We say that racism is a normal part of society. This isn’t just in “classic” cartoons. This stuff is in modern cartoons also.

And the subtle way that it works is to get it normalized in people’s childhood and lives so they feel like you’re taking something sacred away from them. It’s “innocent.” And white people love the illusion of innocence.

Anyway, I need to go. Maybe I’ll revisit later.