Cartoons and Race in America

I have watched a lot of cartoons in my lifetime. I grew up in an era when Saturday mornings were cartoon time. As in, we did not have access to animation 24-hours a day, seven days a week, as I know many of my classmates in this English class (and my own children) did. We watched Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, The Roadrunner, Mighty Mouse, and Super Chicken. We also watched a lot of Disney. Never once did we see that we were being exposed to racism in our Saturday morning entertainment.

Maybe that’s because the heart of cartoons is the art form of caricature. Merriam-Webster has this to say about caricature:

1car·i·ca·ture noun

\ˈker-i-kə-ˌchu̇r, -ˌchər, -ˌtyu̇r, -ˌtu̇r, -ˈka-ri-\

Definition of CARICATURE

1: exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics

2: a representation especially in literature or art that has the qualities of caricature

3: a distortion so gross as to seem like caricature

(Dictionary and Thesaurus)

Caricature is, by its very nature, exaggerative and distortional. It is not a picture of life as it is, but rather life skewed to the ridiculous. I guess I have a hard time finding the insult in something I know is not intended to be a portrait of life as it is or life as it ought to be, but rather is a portrait of life distorted.

In an attempt to meet the expectations for this blog assignment, I watched all the cartoons posted on Blackboard and decided to take a careful look at “All This and Rabbit Stew”. This cartoon features a hunter who is a black man, portrayed as a bumbling “sucker”, who is hunting Bugs Bunny. Taken by itself, it is easy to point out specifics in the cartoon, such as the physical characteristics of the hunter that seem to almost play on minstrel blackface, or the end of the cartoon where the hunter is distracted by the opportunity to play at a game of dice rather than continuing to hunt his prey, and cry “Racial prejudice foul!”

On the other hand, when looking at the cartoon listed on Blackboard simply as “Bugs Bunny”, where once again, Bugs is being hunted, again by a bumbling character, this time a white Mountie with a speech impediment, the viewer is less inclined to want to raise a cry of “Foul!” (Unless you have a pronounced lisp – then you might take offense at the character of Elmer Fudd.)

Why is that? Maybe it is simply the perspective of sensitivity. I think that perhaps, at the time these cartoons were created, people were less sensitive to issues of race than we are now, having had the benefit of the Civil Rights Movement in our history.

Works Cited

Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. 2011. Web. 06 Apr. 2011. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caricature>.