Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating racism or slavery. In fact, both make me sick. However I was confused as to why a children's movie by Disney would be deemed one of the most offensive and racist films ever made. I had to look the criticisms up on the Internet in order to find out what all the controversy was about, and that left me with more questions than answers.
Okay, I can kinda see the point with the Tar Baby story. But I've already written that this is a (relatively) easy fix. But everything else?
One of the reasons given as to why it's so offensive is that the black people in the story seem to be happy with their lives as slaves. Well, as I wrote in my earlier post, they weren't slaves. The story takes place AFTER the civil war, meaning that they're all emancipated. Fixing this confusion is as easy as including the date of the story in the movie's opening, the way Walt Disney originally intended it. And even if the story was set BEFORE the war, and they WERE slaves, surely SOME slave owners in the south treated their slaves well. "Geez! The slaves at the ranch next door are starved half to death, made to live in filth, wear rags that do little to protect them from the cold, and are beaten mercilessly almost every day. Me? I've got good clothes, live in a warm house, am well fed, and only get beaten when I misbehave (which ain't often). I might be a slave, but damn life could be a whole lot worse!"
Another complaint, the black people acted like a bunch of uneducated hicks. Well, in 1870 black people were, for the most part, a bunch of uneducated hicks (at least in the south). So that's not so much being racist as historically accurate. Also, even Jeff Foxworthy (a white guy) admits in one of his stand up comedy acts that "The Southern accent isn't the world's most intelligent sounding accent". So naturally a bunch of people speaking with a southern drawl are going to sound less intelligent, or at least uneducated. And as I said before, how else are a bunch of recently emancipated slaves in the deep south supposed to sound? That not being racist, it's being historically accurate.