A mouse, a louse and a man named Disney

Dear bell

About two months ago, one of the local GLAMOUR magazine’s headlines foretold an issue of top black models (despite the fact that for a whole year, the only black face to every grace the magazine’s cover was that of Beyonce). I looked forward to it as I had previously found the lifestory of Alek Wek quite inspiring. And yes, there were seven international black models on seven pages modelling the latest trends. No mention of where they came from or anything about them other than their names. Just seven beautiful black women with no lives and no personalities. Nothing more interesting than their black bodies and what they looked like. And yet in the course of the year, there were stories after stories about Kate Moss and her drugging habit, her druggie boyfriend and her subsequent success, stories about Britany Spears’s and Amy Winehouse’s rise and fall and rise again. Black people in these forums seem mainly like side orders to the main white course. But in modern popular culture this is hardly new, especially in the most popular of forums. Growing up, I was fed on the Little House on the Prairie, Heidi, the Fonze, the Disney Club – the same one that spawned Justin Timberlake, Britney, Jason Priestly and Christina Aguilere. White person after white person, but there was almost always one black person who ‘represented’. I was a huge fan of the Disney Club as a pre-teen and was crushed when it was off after only two years or so. Almost twenty years and a Lizzy McGuire, Hannah Montana and three High School Musicals later, I have grown to loathe Disney as a the cultural branch of the Klu Klux Klan spreading white supremacist ideologies through popular culture. Watching Disney’s productions brings me back to the days of apartheid and Reagan, when white people dominated my TV and I thought they were the vast majority in the country and the world. Today, in the latter half of the first decade of the new millennium, Disney is brainwashing a new generation of children and teeny-boppers the world over to believe that ‘reality’, that the ‘perfect’ life is a group of white kids laughing, dancing, singing, finding true love and adventure (and yes there is always a black/Mexican/Indian kid present for diversity). Our kids are sold on being dreamy Lizzy McGuires, kick-ass Kim Possibles, cool Hannah Montanas and rich, spoilt Mary Kate and Ashley Olsens.
As a kid, reading the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Bobbsy Twins adventure books gave me a thrill, an escape from my dreary, boring township life. These white kids and teenagers could drive around on their own, go spelunking and fly airplanes. Their holidays always turned into mystery-solving adventures and they had friends and family with all kinds of specialities and resources. I had family who bordered on resembling ‘trailer-trash’-Jerry-Springer-type guests and the furthest I ever went on ‘holiday’ was to my poor aunt’s house twenty minutes away. Reading and watching TV was my magic carpet ride out of my black life. And yes, of course, one realises eventually that it is the highest level of fantasy that is promulgated through this type of media, but living in apartheid South Africa, never having actually interacted with a white person until I was 16 years old, how was I to know that white people were not living some aspect of this fantasy? Apart from The Cosby Show, black people’s lives on TV – from Sanford and Sun, Good Times, Fat Albert, S’gud, S’nice were not to be envied, let alone fantasised about. Black people were poor and often farcical characters, hardly the stuff of dreams. Bollywood movies also supplemented my reality deficit and even though I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, love was the greatest achievement and always won the day (how did people ever earn a living in these movies)? It’s not surprising that despite how much our parents preached to us about not coveting white, Western lives (after all according to my parents they didn’t bath often which resulted in a lucrative perfume business, their kids were dirty and bad-mannered, their wives didn’t know how to cook and they had no culture), we all wanted the white lives we saw on TV, where white people drank a specific drink or smoked a specific cigarette and then skied and snowboarded and parachuted. They always seemed to be having so much damn fun, even when they were working or being teenagers.
And today, even though Barbie can’t seem to quite compete with the likes of Bratz and we finally have a black drunken misfit superhero named Hancock, new generations of kids are soaking up Britney, Christina, Amy, Lindsey, Lizzy, Hannah, Mary Kate, Ashley, Paris, Hayden, Lindsey while we grown women are still dreaming of the lives of the Sex and the City ladies. We buy magazines and visit websites to hang onto what they’re wearing, who they dating, who they’re fighting with, what they’re drugging on and which rehab they just checked out of. Can we blame another generation of dreaming white?
I blame Disney.