The mass media industry as a hegemonic entity has played a vital role in displaying fallacious accounts of black life. Grounded in ideas from scholars like Richard Schechner, Patricia Ticineto, Joseph Roach and Sara Ahmed, this research is a critique of the ways in which memory, and its possible manifestations, plays in non-blacks’ (specifically whites) interpretation, motivation, and perception of stereotypical visual portrayals of blackness. The focus will be on how the continuing phenomenon of stereotyping blackness in the 20th and 21st centuries is perpetuated in child-targeted feature-length animations with animal characters. I argue that the possible furtive and/or involuntary visual manifestations of “black identity” in animation have their sources in a white historical memory that clings to the desire to maintain whiteness. This work demonstrates how ideas of blackness in white memory were not solely constructed from the imaginations of producers of mainstream culture. Rather black stereotypes are the result of a combination of black protest against negative portrayals, blacks as accomplices in perpetuating their negative stereotypes, and whites’ imagined ways of blackness.
Following the work of Anna Everett and Robin Kelly and commentary from Bert Williams and George Walker, the perpetuation of whiteness through imagined black identities in media outlets does not take into account the ways in which blacks think of and present themselves within black communities, the ways blacks display their identity outside the constraints of white imagination, or how blacks openly or discreetly oppose stereotypical caricatures. However, the change in the portrayal of black people after the Civil Rights Movement (1945-1964) is the result of the powerful black collective voice influencing change in nefarious deceptions of African-Americans in media outlets. This change, according to Donald Bogle, Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, however, simply gave new faces to old caricatures. Therefore, the continued practice of stereotyping blacks by way of dated Enlightenment thinking regardless of black protest speaks to the pervasiveness of “blackness” via the malignant ideology of whiteness. The desire to sustain ideologies and practices of mainstream media has prevented the erasure of black caricatures. The compromise between portrayals of whiteness and holistic portrayals of black life is more sophisticated making black caricatures more elusive, but still evident. Through a critical evaluation of Scrub Me Mama, Shark Tale and Madagascar, this research will demonstrate how ideas of Enlightenment theories of race from the 17th and 18th centuries has a prolonged history that leads to anthropomorphic animation of the 21st century.
Movies have the ability to be used as a critical space for the interpretation and evaluation of stereotypes. When typecasts are confronted, they can be used to make more complex black characters and the information acquired during critical evaluation can be used to interrogate the trends seen in housing, employment, and judicial discrimination against people of color. The ultimate goal of this project is for audience members to be conscious consumers of media products and recognize that movie characters have the ability to influence real-life interactions with the people those characters supposedly represent.