At the end of the Disney film “Dumbo” (1941) five black crows “teach” Dumbo, a large-eared elephant, how to fly. They are clearly meant to be culturally Black American, but seem to play to stereotype. The scene regularly makes top-ten lists of Disney’s most racist moments, but others argue it is not racist at all.
To review:
The minstrel Jim Crow and Disney’s Jim Crow.
Jim Crow was the name given in the script to the leading crow. Jim Crow was also the name of the lead character in minstrel shows, who played to White stereotypes about Black people for laughs. It was also the name given to the racist laws in the US south of the time.
Cliff Edwards, a White voice actor, played Jim Crow, the leading crow in “Dumbo”. He spoke and sang in “Negro dialect” – verbal blackface. The other crows were played by Black men from the Hall Johnson choir, they who also sang in the even more racially problematic Disney film, “Song of the South” (1946) – zip-a-dee-doo-dah!
Negro dialect: the line in the song “When I See an Elephant Fly”:
“But I be don’ seen ‘bout ev’rythang, when I see a elephant fly”
has been changed in current Disney songbooks to this:
“But I think I will have seen ev’rything when I see an elephant fly.”
The “Song of the Roustabouts” at the beginning of film is, if anything, worse. It is sung by Black circus workers without faces! They sing such lines as:
“We slave until we’re almost dead
We’re happy-hearted roustabouts”
and:
“Keep on working
Stop that shirking
Pull that rope, you hairy ape.”
The 2019 remake of “Dumbo” – count the Black people!
The 2019 Disney remake of “Dumbo” cut out both the crows and the Black roustabouts – but had only one token Black character to take their place.
Disney+, its streaming video service, “doesn’t plan to include a scene from the 1941 animated film Dumbo featuring a crow named Jim Crow,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
In Disney’s defence:
Joe Grant, one of the lead animators who worked on “Dumbo”, said of the crows:
“It seems strange that racial offence should be discovered in their depiction: is it somehow alright to caricature whites but not blacks? That surely is a very deep racism, far deeper than anything in the friendly portrayal … of the crows… although perhaps naming one of them Jim Crow was a little questionable.”
In short: We caricature everyone! And: It was a nice caricature!
Disney authenticity: Disney, on its “Dumbo” DVD, says that the movements of the crows were modelled on the Nicholas Brothers, famous Black dancers of the day, and that the way the crows talked was little different than what you would have heard, say, on a Cab Calloway album back then.
The Tonto Defence: Some point out that the crows helped Dumbo and therefore, if anything, it put Black people in a good light. But by that measure, Mammy and Black Best Friend characters are not racist either, even though they are, as bell hooks would put it, “reconfigured to the greater good of whiteness”.
– Abagond, 2019.
Sources: mainly Google Images, “Dumbo” (1941, 2019), Hollywood Reporter, Jim Crow Museum (Joe Grant quote), Music 345.
See also:
- stereotype
- minstrel show
- Hollywood whitewashing
- also the 1940s:
- Jim Crow
- That ice cream truck song
- Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs – its White creators argued it was culturally authentic
- Tintin in the Congo
- Listening to Amos & Andy
- Ebonics: time and tense – is “I be don’ seen” real Black English?
599
Abagond 
“…perhaps naming one of them Jim Crow was a little questionable.” -ya think? White folks always caricature themselves as fine, upstanding people who put African Americans, and other non-Whites into their racially charged perceptions of us as stereotypical “funnies” – there, for their amusement.
LikeLike
There are countless pre-civil rights movies where the animals are treated better than the people of color. Most members of the dominant society seem to find joy in such provacatives.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Honestly dumbo wasnt on our watchlist when my boys were coming up as kids, i think i saw the movie once in my 20’s. I do remember having had a children’s picture of brer rabbit and my parents having the zipdidee doo dah record on vinyl (burl ives?). I remember tje tar baby with its button eues. Also, my mom was a high level contractor at a pharma co. (No longer works there situation) and she told me, i was in my 30’s, she trotted out the phrase ‘ a tar baby’ with regard to a difficult situation, and she was mortified that her choice of words was not well received!
LikeLike
*picture book
LikeLike
The crows weren’t helping Dumbo, they just wanted him to jump to suicidal death so they could eat the corpse. They view Dumbo as food, not as a friend
LikeLike
Oh Lord!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well I already learned of Disney’s racism. I have never seen Dumbo. This doesn’t surprise or shock me.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah. Good old Dumbo. Walt Disney: embodiment of all things white. Keeper of the flame. 1955, when Amerikka was waxing strong as a world power and a little Italian girl named Annette Funicello on the Mickey Mouse Club was considered a minority. Yep. I remember Song of the South and Uncle Remus and the tar baby and Oberfuhrer Disney, with his easy relaxed and fatherly smile.That was when Amerikka was great and the darkies knew their place in the world and the universe. Amen.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@ August Noone
Make Amerikkka great again!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Lol!
LikeLike
How about the Democrats, aren’t they racist too? And what you expect from 1900s cartoons love from white people.
LikeLike
Black people still looking for acceptance from white people. Next the Black Brown Alliance , Lol.
LikeLike
So much racism, especially back then
LikeLiked by 1 person
Commenting on this a year and a half after it was posted because this is in the news now with Dumbo (and some other movies) being pulled from Disney+
‘Negro dialect’ was, and is, not ‘verbal blackface’. Slaves, and many of their descendants for generations, actually did talk like that. You don’t have to like it, but it was a historical reality.
We know this for a fact, because in the 1930s and 40s, particularly under the Works Progress Administration’s Slave Narratives project, writers traveled around the country collecting testimony from surviving slaves. And they went out of their way to write down accurately how the ex-slaves actually spoke. And lest you think the writers were just engaged in a conspiracy and making it all up, in some cases they also made audio recordings, and yes, most of them did in fact speak in ‘Negro dialect’.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/
https://www.openculture.com/2020/06/hear-the-voices-of-americans-born-in-slavery.html
I’m not particularly interested in defending Dumbo, but the mere portrayal of ‘slave speak’ is not racist. It can be done with the intent of mocking, and it very often was (it was at least partly done in mockery in Dumbo; though in that context the fact that Disney movies tended to caricature people in general is actually a valid defense, whether you think it is or not). But it’s historical revisionism to say slaves didn’t actually talk like this, and that any portrayal of it is ‘racist’.
LikeLike
Ben:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2019/10/24/minstrelese/
LikeLike
Ben:
Your argument can be applied to blackface itself:
The mere portrayal of ‘blackface’ is not racist. Slaves, and many of their descendants for generations, actually did look like that. You don’t have to like it, but it was a historical reality. We know this for a fact, because we have photographs going back to the 1850s, and yes, most of them did in fact have black faces.
LikeLike
@ Ben
I disagree.
It is not the same thing. At all. Hollywood does not merely misrepresent racial minorities, it also under-represents them, which makes the misrepresentations all the more damaging and stereotyping. Sure, there are unflattering representations of White people in Hollywood, but there are also plenty of flattering ones. For one thing, they get to be the heroes or love interests of the vast majority of Hollywood films, way in excess of their share of the US population.
Also context: the US is racially segregated. Even now, something like 75% of White people have no close Black friends. That means they are way more likely to take media representations of Black people at face value.
LikeLike
@ Ben
Abagond linked to his blog post on minstrelese. In the comment section there, I wrote about reasons to doubt the accuracy of the depiction of dialect in the WPA slave narratives:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2019/10/24/minstrelese/#comment-42832
I’ll add another point here. The WPA interviewers were not given any rigorous training in linguistical transcription. This is evident from the wide disparity of the use of eye-dialect from one interviewer to another. Some of the slave narratives look like Uncle Remus stories, with almost every word given in eye-dialect, full of “ob” and “dem” and “sho,” while in other narratives by different interviewers this is used judiciously or is entirely absent. Such inconsistency demonstrates that there was no effort to have all interviewers adhere to the same academic standard of phonetic transcription.
In fact, one of your own sources, the Library of Congress website, discusses this inconsistency and other problematic issues:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/note-on-the-language-of-the-narratives/
LikeLike
Here is a link to a Slate article that gives an in-depth review of the book Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project by Catherine Stewart:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2016/07/can_wpa_slave_narratives_be_trusted_or_are_they_tainted_by_depression_era.html
Some quotes pertinent to this discussion:
LikeLike
@abagond
“Your argument can be applied to blackface itself”
This ‘logic’ is beyond ludicrous. Do you genuinely not see a difference between people who aren’t black pretending to be black, and people recording the speech of actual black people?
@Solitaire
Ah, of course. the writers were totally engaged in a conspiracy to lie about how their interview subjects were talking. This is totally a plausible and likely explanation. /s Or some sort of latent racism made them, what, transform ‘normal’ speech that entered their ears into a racist caricature by the time it reached their brains?
Those ‘critiques’ are just desperate, elaborate copes to try and dismiss a core truth that modern academics find unpleasant. I’m sure you could make lots of valid critiques of the lack of standardization in rendering colloquial speech; one author would transcript the sounds one way, another would transcript it another. But none of that changes the core fact that the people being interviewed did speak in a distinct style.
Unless, again, the argument is something like that they were speaking dictionary perfect English and the interviewers were just so damn racist they refused to transcribe this accurately.
And in particular, the review of the Catherine Stewart book has nothing to say about this essential core fact of how the interviewees talked. Instead she’s talking about issues like the explanations for the characteristic speech:
“In correspondence between state and federal directors, Stewart found that white Southern directors spun out “their own racialized explanations for black folk speech. And they came up with a number of explanations for why they feel that ex-slave informants are slurring their words, or speaking differently, or leaving endings off certain words.” Stewart points out that in some instances these ways of speaking were “part of kind of a Southern regional dialect, much more than they are any kind of indication of a racialized identity.” But in their discussions about dialect, white personnel would hypothesize about the connection between this kind of speaking and a supposedly ingrained laziness…”
In other words, directors came up with racist explanations for the speech, or may have incorrectly thought of a more generalized southern dialect as a specifically black dialect. None of which changes the fact that the people being interviewed actually did talk in a certain way.
I also note that you don’t even attempt to engage with the fact that there are audio recordings of later interviews.
LikeLike
@ Ben
“Do you genuinely not see a difference between people who aren’t black pretending to be black, and people recording the speech of actual black people?”
Did you not notice that the dialogue of the crows in Dumbo was written by white people, who got it wrong? That’s what Abagond means by verbal blackface.
“Ah, of course. the writers were totally engaged in a conspiracy to lie about how their interview subjects were talking. This is totally a plausible and likely explanation. /s”
I never said that. However, Catherine Stewart did find several regional and even state offices which refused to hire black interviewers despite direct orders from the federal headquarters to do so. Not exactly a conspiracy, maybe, but definitely resistance against hiring people who were more likely to represent the interviewees in a different manner.
“Or some sort of latent racism made them, what, transform ‘normal’ speech that entered their ears into a racist caricature by the time it reached their brains?”
I never said that, either. What I did say (in more detail in the Minstrelese thread) is that most of the WPA interviewers did not have recording equipment. Some were even instructed not to take handwritten notes during the interviews. So by the time they sat down to try to reconstruct the interview from written notes or memory, yes, I do think they easily could have introduced errors based on their existing subconscious ideas of what black speech should sound like.
I’ve used the word “transcripts” myself to describe the narratives, but they aren’t transcripts the way we think of transcription in the current day. They are closer to reconstructions, because there was no word-for-word stenography or recording.
“Normal” speech doesn’t exist. Every single person has an accent or a dialect. You don’t hear your own because to you it is normal. But people from different regions, social classes, or races do hear it when you speak.
This is what makes eye-dialect so insidious when used in sociological contexts. For example, almost every single person in the USA says “wanna” or “wan’ to” or “wan’ ta” instead of “want to.” Yet we consider “want to” as being “normal” English.
When we represent a certain group as speaking “normal” English (want to) and use eye-dialect for another group to signify nonstandard English (wan’ ta) even when both groups drop the “t” — yes, that does reveal bias.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect#Use
“Those ‘critiques’ are just desperate, elaborate copes to try and dismiss a core truth that modern academics find unpleasant.”
That’s a huge misunderstanding or misrepresentation on your part. I’ve never seen any modern academics deny that such dialects exist. What they do point out is the reasons why we can’t assume representations of those dialects in older source materials are necessarily authentic and accurate.
“I’m sure you could make lots of valid critiques of the lack of standardization in rendering colloquial speech; one author would transcript the sounds one way, another would transcript it another.”
It wasn’t just the various spellings used to represent sounds, but also marked inconsistencies concerning other grammatical features like the “we am” construction. Which again is not to claim that the interviewees spoke perfectly correct English, but rather to point out that the WPA interview transcripts are so wildly inconsistent that they cannot be trusted as a reliable source for black dialect as it actually was spoken.
“But none of that changes the core fact that the people being interviewed did speak in a distinct style.”
They presumably spoke in several distinctly different styles based on region. Black people in Louisiana would not have spoken exactly like black people in Arkansas or Virginia. Yet for the most part, in the WPA interviews we don’t see any of these regional differences in dialect, accent, vocabulary, etc. That’s yet another reason to suspect their accuracy.
“And in particular, the review of the Catherine Stewart book has nothing to say about this essential core fact of how the interviewees talked. Instead she’s talking about issues like the explanations for the characteristic speech…. In other words, directors came up with racist explanations for the speech, or may have incorrectly thought of a more generalized southern dialect as a specifically black dialect. None of which changes the fact that the people being interviewed actually did talk in a certain way.”
I have yet to get ahold of a copy of Stewart’s book, but from what I’ve been able to read online, she has an entire chapter on the question of representing the dialect. In her research she found correspondence containing arguments over the issue between state-level directors and the federal office. Those racist explanations were given in defense of the eye-dialect, which the head of the project was explicitly opposed to using.
It was highly unlikely that those state directors mistook the generalized southern dialect as a specifically black dialect because they were locals. They were white southerners who themselves spoke a southern dialect.
You’re misunderstanding Stewart’s point, which is that these white southern directors were so steeped in a literature and a minstrel tradition which represented southern blacks as speaking a particular way that they refused to acknowledge the real similarity in how whites and blacks spoke in their region.
“I also note that you don’t even attempt to engage with the fact that there are audio recordings of later interviews.”
There are relatively few extant recordings of later interviews, as well. I’ve listened to some of them, both from the WPA project and the later ones.
When I listen to those recordings, I hear people who — while they do not speak perfect textbook English — still are much more well-spoken than the majority of the WPA interview texts would lead one to believe.
Many of the speakers also sound so much like my white southern grandparents and great-grandparents that it makes my heart ache, almost like it is 50 years ago and I can hear them yet again.
LikeLike
@ Ben
Cliff Edwards, who played Jim Crow, is White. He is not an actual Black person. In the post, he is the one who I said was practising “verbal blackface”.
LikeLike
@abagond
Wow, you’re disingenuous. I’m not even talking about the movie here, I’m talking about the WPA interviews.
LikeLike
@ Ben
My mistake. I must have missed where you moved the goalposts.
LikeLike
I didn’t move anything, and you know it, but fine. Play that game if you want to.
LikeLike
Hello! I really appreciate that you discuss this topic. I am currently working on a blog entry (for my university) and would like to ask you if I could use the secound picture in your article. I would really appreciate an answer!
LikeLike
@ Nicole
Fine by me, BUT PLEASE NOTE that I do not own the rights to any of the images on this website. I mainly just pull them off of Google Images and maybe do some simple editing of them. It seems that in this case I stuck two pictures together, but I do not own the rights to either picture.
LikeLike