Fear Of A Black Princess

Alan Jenkins, TomPaine.com

September 11, 2007

There’s an old joke, retold by Woody Allen in the film "Annie Hall," in which two elderly women are having dinner at a Catskill mountain resort. One of the women says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." I had a similar reaction when I heard last week that Disney would soon be releasing its first film to feature an African-American “princess”: It’s about time; and I kind of wish they wouldn’t.

As the father of two young girls, I’m immersed in princess-land and, for that matter, everything Disney—from the excruciating "High School Musical" I and II to the mildly redeeming Cheetah Girls franchise. And as the father of two young African-American girls, the effort to find positive role models in whom they can see themselves and who have resonance in their world is both exhausting and frustrating.

It’s not that there’s a shortage of successful black women in the world or in their lives: their mom and Michelle Obama—both Harvard Law School graduates—are just two examples. But the power of Disney and, particularly, Disney’s princesses is undeniable. At my girls’ public school, which is overwhelmingly black, female conversation is a bit more likely to revolve around Disney Channel programming than the YouTube presidential debate, or even Oprah.

For non-parents (or even parents of boys) it’s hard to convey the omnipresence of the Disney media and product autocracy over which the princesses currently rule: there is the Disney Channel on cable; Disney Radio on the AM dial, the MP3 songs, the theme park “characters,” and the constant flow of theatrical, cable, and DVD movies. And then there are the toys, pajamas, Halloween costumes, hair ties, notebooks, sleeping bags, and birthday plates. In a particularly diabolical stroke of genius, Disney and Mattel have teamed up to market “Barbie as Cinderella,” and many of the other royal gals (a k a Snow White, Beauty and the Beast’s Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel of "The Little Mermaid," Mulan and Pocahontas). We tried hard to prevent their rise to power in our home, of course. But once introduced by well- meaning relatives, they, like all despots, are hard to depose.

With the Disney/Princess/Barbie matriarchal oligopoly at the height of its power, the absence of an African-American princess amid the increasingly multicultural princess posse was becoming hard to explain. In addition to the many European princesses, there has now been an Asian, Arab, and Native American princess, and even a mermaid princess. We teach our kids values and self-worth, but as young filmmaker Kiri Davis’s "A Girl Like Me" painfully reminds us, they are also keen observers of what and whom our dominant culture values, and why.

So along comes the announcement about Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog,” mercifully renamed from its original “The Frog Princess.” The film will be “an American fairy tale musical set in New Orleans during the 1920s Jazz Age,” with young protagonist Tiana as the first black Disney princess.

Teenage blogger Freckles Cassie expressed the ambivalence that many feel about this news, writing “I am really glad that Disney has decided to have a black princess, but will she be allowed to rescue someone else and be strong like Pocahontas, or will she be like the white princesses and wait for a prince to rescue her?”

My own questions include that and others: will the film acknowledge the segregated Deep South of the 1920s, and how? Will “Princess” Tiana have recognizable black features, or will she simply be a dark-skinned version of Cinderella or Snow White, as Pocahontas was? (Early images seem to walk the line.) Will Disney follow its well-worn pattern of disappeared, deadbeat, and murderous parents, or will there be positive adult role models as well? And will the parade of loud-mouthed, “sassy” and emasculating African-American female characters that have caused my wife and me to sharply limit our kids’ consumption of Disney, Nick Jr. and other kids TV rear their wagging heads?

The trouble is, the film could be so valuable, culturally as well as educationally, and yet it could also be so damaging. This stuff is pervasive in our kids’ culture, and simply turning the TV off (which we increasingly do) doesn’t quite do it. That the film is set in New Orleans raises the stakes even further.

And, of course, we’ve been burned so many times before. Never mind the appalling Uncle Remus of Disney’s 1946 Song of the South or the minstrelized black birds of the 1941 Dumbo. (Disney’s declined to re-release Song of the South, but Dumbo’s still circling out there). There are the divisive Middle Eastern stereotypes of 1992’s "Aladdin," the hackneyed Black and Latino voiced hyenas from the African savannah ghetto in "The Lion King," and, as blogger Freckles Cassie notes, the mindless pursuit of man and marriage that pervades almost all of the princess films.

To be sure, Disney films are full of silly, deceitful, cowardly, ignorant, obsequious and even sassy white characters. The difference is that those characters live amongst hundreds of honorable, brave, intelligent and honest white portrayals in the dominant media universe. Unlike Tiana, Jasmine, Mulan, and Pocahontas, they do not carry the weight of their entire group on their shoulders. They shape neither the esteem of their own group members nor the perceptions of others toward them.

A popular song from "Aladdin" begins, “Oh, I come from a land, From a faraway place, Where the caravan camels roam, Where they cut off your ear If they don’t like your face, It’s Barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” Disney executives were apparently surprised that Arab Americans viewed this and many other aspects of "Aladdin" as perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Let’s hope they’ve learned something since then.