Song of the South

In 1946 Disney released Song of the South, a movie featuring characters made popular some 70 years previous by a writer named Joel Chandler Harris (1).  Song of the South was a part animated and part live action film in which an Uncle Tom type character named Uncle Remus taught children lessons by telling them stories about characters like Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Tar Baby (2).  These stories with their black anthropomorphic - might I be so bold as coin the term Afropomorphic - characters were direct adaptations of those characters familiar in slave folk tales (1).

 Tar Baby and Brer' Rabbit  (screen shot form Song of the South, 1946)

Joel Chandler Harris sparked as much controversy with his writings in the late 19th century as he does today.  He borrowed heavily from the folk tales he learned while growing up among slaves in rural Goergia, and while some cite his very archetypal caricatures of African-Americans as proof of racist leanings, there are many in the black academic community today who credit his writings as well as the characters themselves as subversive and critical to the prejudices of the South, and still others who vindicate Disney, saying that their interpretation of Harris's tales "perpetuated and popularized approaches that understood Harris's stories as simpleminded tales aimed at entertaining children," (1).  A shy and socially inept man, Harris's nature belied his sharp mind and masterful writing ability.  He was to the world the trickster Brer Rabbit, waving his "world right under the noses of of a society he knew it would appall," and presenting a critique of the South by usung the subversive black characters he was raised to love (1).

Controversy

Due to it's potentially racially inflammatory content, Song of the South has yet to be released in the United States.  It is the only full-length Disney animated motion picture to hold this status (2).  Racially charged dialogue centering around the stories still persists however.  One of the more inflammatory Disney characters, Tar Baby was and is a metaphor for getting mired in a sticky situation, but it was also a blackface stereotype which still manages to cause controversy.  In July of 2006, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney apologized for using the term in reference to a Massachusetts tunnel project which had been plagued with problems, saying "The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can," (3).  Commentary from the black community following Romney's remarks ranged from forgiving to very critical; with some doubting that the term was intended to be disparaging and crediting his use of the term to ignorance of it's origins, and some doubting his his moral qualifications to run for president, calling Romney's words "arrogant" and "totally inappropriate," (4,3).

Tar Baby and Brer' Rabbit  (E.W. Kemble 1904)

Legacy of Harris and Song of the South in Pop Culture

The central crux then and now to the history of Uncle Remus, Tar Baby, and the Brer characters is that they were subversive and ambiguous, simultaneously stereotyping a people and elevating the accumulated wisdom of these people.  For over a century America was fascinated with blackface characters popularized by men who sought only to exploit a culture not their own.  Blackface pop-culture encouraged a cruelly inaccurate racial formation.  The public face of black America was unnaturally dark, jovial and simple.  Song of the South and it's progenitor Joel Chandler Harris were different in that their purposes were not to entertain by mocking black Americans.  It is true that in some people's eyes they perpetuated a negative stereotype (everyone draws different conclusions from artworks, and the Uncle Remus stories were deliberately ambiguous), but that the proliferation of Uncle Remus was the act of a man (Harris) who relayed these tales from a culture he grew up in, a culture that he loved (1).  These stories push a racial formation with origins entirely different from the genesis of minstrel theatre; a white man stealing the clothes and persona of a poor black beggar that he might make some money by mocking black culture.  While being prime examples of steroetypical blackface themed entertainment, Song of the South and the stories which inspired it trace their origins to authentic slave folk tales.  These folk tales contributed to the common sense cultural mentality of African American slaves and  serve as a shining example of the wisdom of these people, ultimately edifying the beliefs and culture of a sect of American society who was otherwise voiceless until later on in the 20th century.  Song of the South solidified the writings of Joel Chandler Harris as possibly the first widely popular literature to directly relate African-American culture, contributing to less derogatory (albeit stereotyped) black racial formation and blazing a path for the black cartoon protagonists which would follow.

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