Wrong Then

Last night, a group I’m in was discussing cognitohazards—things that are only dangers to you if you know about them. Obviously, giving examples is an issue, but one of the ones that came up was the name of H. P. Lovecraft’s cat. If you know what he named his cat, and the only hint I’ll give those who don’t is that it was a black cat, you’re already wincing. A lot of Lovecraft’s issues get excused with “well, he was a man of his time.” And yes he was, and people who knew him still tended to react to Lovecraft with “wow, that’s really racist.”

Rocky and Bullwinkle is on the Roku Channel—with a warning about some of its character portrayals. I don’t think they’re particularly worried about Boris and Natasha, even though there’s a lot to unpack about them, but there are definitely lazy portrayals of Native Americans that I remember, and I haven’t even watched the whole series recently. Disney+ has its boilerplate warning, which I believe they broke out in time for putting The Muppet Show on the channel. I happen to believe that it’s a better solution to the problem than hiding the works entirely, but I do kind of miss having, say, Whoopi Goldberg come out and explain to you the racism in old Warner Bros. Cartoons.

I haven’t talked to my kids much about these things, because they don’t tend to watch the things where it’s an issue. But I’m currently talking to them about broadening their media horizons, and that means we’re going to hit moments that make modern audiences blink at minimum. My son is definitely old enough so that I can sit him down and have a talk with him about why these things appear in older works and what they mean today. And not just in Disney’s “they were wrong then and they’re wrong now” fashion.

Don’t get me wrong; Disney is absolutely right to emphasize that they weren’t right in the ‘40s or ‘50s or early ‘80s. They were indeed wrong. It isn’t okay to have slit-eyed Chinese characters with buck teeth or black characters with huge lips or, you know, everything that’s going on in Peter Pan. That implies that it’s perfectly okay to discriminate against people until it isn’t, and that’s some deeply problematic thinking. What’s the tipping point? When does it stop being okay to be a bigot?

But here’s the thing—in many cases, “for its time” is a lazy excuse. Especially when it comes to film. Like, Shakespeare was a racist and an anti-Semite and did he ever meet a black person or a Jew? Quite possibly not, especially the former. But the movies are relatively new—and what’s more, they were made in a time and place where it was impossible not to meet all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds. Frankly especially at Disney. Warners appears to have been fairly white, but I’m constantly writing about Disney people who weren’t.

What’s more, there are always people who don’t have the prevailing attitude. Not just, you know, of the group being discriminated against. I’m pretty sure that, had Walt actually run “What Makes the Red Man Red” past a Native American—not Iron Eyes Cody, even though he’d been kicking around Hollywood since the silent era, but perhaps Jay Silverheels or Chief Yowlachie—it would have looked different. But there were white people writing nuanced, sympathetic portrayals of PoC long before you could be canceled for not.

This happens in real life; my mom is 81 and responded to a story I told her about a trans friend of mine using the correct pronouns. I’m nearly fifty and assumed to be a bigot in ways I promise you I am not. My paternal grandfather was a Methodist minister and served on a couple of different reservations in Arizona and treated his Native parishioners the same as his white ones. Sure, I’ve already had to relearn language—I remember when “queer” was exclusively a slur, kids, and let’s not even start about terminology for people with developmental disabilities. But I was in the ‘90s and trying to use correct terminology. Which I grant you is a slur now.

I do think we should notice when people rose above what was expected of their time, because it’s true that the attitudes of an era are what they are. When movies and shows use actual Native American actors instead of white guys in redface. When black characters are given real personalities. When female characters are given agency. When queer characters aren’t the joke. Because there was a cultural weight behind not doing that. Without people like that, “for its time” would become “for our time.” It may be the bare minimum to, say, cast Sessue Hayakawa instead of Mickey Rooney. But celebrate the bare minimum because it was done.

But you can praise Jack Benny for treating Eddie Anderson like just another member of the cast without acting like it would have been okay if he hadn’t. It wouldn’t. Sure, underpaying Anderson and letting him be segregated away from the cast and so forth would have been the normal thing to do in those days. But normal isn’t right just as legal and moral are not reliable synonyms. It would have been wrong, and people who disagreed shouldn’t get a pass on bad actions just because they were the fashion at the time.