Wampler 1 Holly Wampler Elizabeth Kaszynski Persuasion C324 1 May 2015 Disney Princesses: Selling White Privilege With grandiose castles and glistening gowns, fairy tales with enchanting princesses saturate American children’s media and capture the hearts of millions of little girls all around the country. In particular, Disney Princesses are among the first cultural texts that young girls interact with and build long-lasting, special relationships with long before their formal education begins and their critical thinking skills develop. The colorful visuals and fantasy elements engage young girls’ imaginations, prompting attempts of self-identification with these fictional princesses. By establishing a paragon of beauty and ever-after happiness, Disney princesses are central to a young girls social learning, formation of personal memory, and pedagogy of femininity. In order to have a more positive self-image and self-esteem later in life, children must be able to see and identify with positive representations of their multiple personal identities in the media. In her essay “Seeing White: Children of Color and the Disney Fairy Tale Princess”, Dorothy Hurley explains that a child’s implicit and explicit belief system is shaped by exposure to representation in the media (Hurley, 2005, pg 222). However, young, non-white girls do not see their race represented positively in non-white Disney Princesses, much less equally in comparison with the white Disney Princesses. By representing non-white princesses as less beautiful and desirable, Disney dangerously intersects race and gender by establishing white as the feminine ideal and framing non-white ethnicities as inferior, which ultimately damages young girls’ self-perception and self-efficacy as they form their gender and racial identities.
Wampler 2 According to Forbes Magazine, Disney Princesses earned 1.6 billion dollars in 2011 retail sales, topping the list of best selling entertainment products in America (Goudreau, 2012). When featured in consumer products that young age demographics interact with on a daily basis, Disney Princesses command a higher than average royalty of 15% or sometimes even higher (Goudreau, 2012). With such a large market presence, it is undeniable that Disney Princesses are an influential cultural icon of America’s past and present and will continue to be in the future. In a 2014 analysis performed by Time Magazine of the eleven best selling Disney Princesses in terms of toys on Ebay since 2013, the only two non-white princesses on the list, Jasmine and Tiana, ranked #9 and #10 on a list of 11 princesses (Dockterman, 2014). Mulan and Pocahontas did not even make the list. Princess Jasmine from Aladdin ranked #9 at $253, 102 and Princess Tiana from The Princess and The Frog ranked #10 at $84,882 (Dockterman, 2014). Both princesses’ revenues are significantly less than the #1 ranking princess, Elsa from Frozen, who earned $3,397,816 and Cinderella coming in second place at $2,504,259 (Dockterman, 2014). Although they have comparatively minimal lines of actual dialogue and less character development in their respective movies, Jasmine and Tiana still fall below Snow White, who comes in third place and Aurora, who comes in seventh place (Dockterman, 2014). If Disney has made an effort to diversify their Princess line up with more non-white princesses for young girls to identify with, why is there such a drastic gap in consumer consumption between the white and non-white princesses? The answer lies in the marketing techniques. The ways in which Disney brands and markets their princesses on their company website establishes a hierarchy of desirability and superiority that clearly underscores white privilege. On Disney’s “About Me” sections of the Disney Princess website in 2006, there are descriptions of seven princesses, four princesses being white and three princesses being nonwhite. From a numerical standpoint, the non-white princesses comprise almost half the line up,
Wampler 3 which at first glance seems like a moderately well rounded racial representation. However, at closer examination of how Disney portrays these princess characters, there are blatant stereotypes and racism present that negate any positive notions of diversity in the lineup. Cinderella, Ariel, Aurora, and Belle are the white princesses featured on the webpage. Cinderella is described as “white, blond, gentle, soft spoken, a keen intelligent sense of humor, and true dignity” (Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 70). Ariel is described as a “redheaded mermaid” that “feisty and a bit naïve” (Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 70). Aurora is described as “white, blond, gentle, loving, and thoughtful” (Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 70). And finally, Belle is described as “lovely as her name implies, natural beauty with inner strength” (Mac Naughton, 2009, pg 70). Cinderella and Aurora’s descriptions both begin with their white ethnicity, almost as though that is the clear priority. Immediately after their race, their blonde hair color is mentioned as a marker of white beauty. Although Belle is characterized as a resourceful book lover in Beauty and The Beast, only her physical appearance is mentioned in her descriptor. In “Intersecting Identities: Fantast, Popular Culture, and Feminized “Race”Gender”, the authors explain that this white privilege “effectively collapses all gendered identities into whiteness, and such produces whiteness as the desirable and privilege position to which all girls should aspire” (Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 71). Descriptors such as “gentle”, “soft spoken”, “true dignity”, “loving”, “natural beauty”, and “thoughtful” are all passive, maternal feminine characteristics that young girls are signaled that they should adopt in order to be as loved and admired as these white princesses. However, the description of the mermaid princess Ariel seems like an anomaly among the physically white princesses. Instead of being described as independent or determined, she is simplified as “feisty” and “naïve” (Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 70). Her emphasized negative characteristics, red hair, and quasi-human state position her as the anti-
Wampler 4 female and the least desirable of the white princess characters. On the other hand, the non-white princesses in the line up were Jasmine, Mulan, and Pocahontas. Mulan was briefly described as a “princess from a Chinese folk tale”, but had no detailed “About Me” section like any of the other princesses (Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 70). The fact that Disney simply neglected to give Mulan a personality on the website aside from her Chinese ethnicity immediately implies that her race is the only trait worth mentioning. Jasmine is described as “exotic fiery beauty…doesn’t want much – just to marry for love and to experience life outside the palace” (Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 70). She is immediately labeled as being “exotic” almost as if she is an animal in a zoo from a far away land. Considering her Middle Eastern origin coupled with this descriptor, it also implicitly orients both whiteness and America as a referential center from which all else is compared and measured. The description of her motivations convey a sense that she is trapped and oppressed, which reinforces the stereotype that Middle Eastern cultures are oppressive and hostile to women. Finally, Pocahontas is described as “beautiful, playful, free-spirited with a passionate spirit and a ‘forest home’” (Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 70). Pocahontas’ “free spirited” nature does not grant her the same regal or feminine qualities as the other white princesses. Her personality description also subtley implies that she is free spirited because she lives in a Native American culture that is not considered civilized by the dominant white culture. The mention of her “forest home” plays into the stereotype that all Native American people live in teepees far away from civilization, thus framing Pocahontas and her culture as inferior and needing salvation from a white civilization. In the descriptions of the Disney Princesses, the white princesses are clearly privileged and preferenced as the ideal image of femininity while the non-white princesses are shackled by cultural stereotypes and portrayed as inferior.
Wampler 5 While the non-white princesses have different skin colors, they are still beautiful with facial features that are readibly white, further upholding the conception of beauty as whiteness. While Disney may manufacture a Disney princess with a non-white skin color, the company hardly gives these princesses a cultural identity or a voice. Between the white and non-white princesses, there is little difference in the facial features and body structure. The large eyes, delicate facial structures, and small waists are all manifestations of a white beauty standard that are projected onto the non-white princesses. In “Intersecting Identities: Fantasy, Popular Culture, and Feminized “Race”-Gender”, the authors cite Ann du Cille’s arguments in her essay “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbies and the Merchandizing of Difference” to explain that these nonwhite Disney princesses are not a celebration of ethnic diversity, but rather a tactic in the strategy of whiteness. Similarly to the multicultural Barbies, the non-white princess characters “do not represent ‘the triumph of difference but rather that similarity, a mediated text no matter what its dye job, must be readable as white” (as cited in Mac Naughton, Davis, and Smith, 2009, pg 69). The physical erasing and whitewashing of Disney’s ethnic princesses directly privileges idealized norms of white beauty by molding other ethnicities to them (McNaughton, Davis, White, 2009, pg 71). Whitewashing these ethnic, unique characteristics and then covering them with a different skin color is a tactic that naturalizes white privilege at an early age and evades detection later in life. In Peggy McIntosh’s article she reflects upon the unearned privileges and advantages that her ethnicity grants her as “an invisible package of assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant” to remain oblivious” (McIntosh, 1988, pg 3). Among her long list of privileges, she explains that she can “turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of [her] race widely represented” and she can “remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority
Wampler 6 without feeling in [her] culture any penalty for oblivion” (McIntosh, 1988, pg 3). When other races and ethnicities are minimized or erased in the face of white privilege, it implicitly allows children at an early age to view whiteness and Western civilization as the superior center of culture while treating any other culture as an irrelevant, unimportant “other”. Through the lens of Stuart Hall examining representation, the negative meanings we assign to non-white ethnic groups through representation naturalizes subjective prejudices as a distorted “objective” experience that conceptualizes negative or undesirable characteristics as inherent to a race. Hall states that “meaning arises because of the shared conceptual maps which groups or member of a culture share together” (Hall, 1997) and that “the true meaning of it will depend on what meaning people make of it; and the meanings they make out of it depend on how it is represented” (Hall, 1997). Companies with a strong market and cultural presence such as Disney have the power in shaping the present and future of these cultural maps as well the world view of a child. Through the Disney princess characters, Disney portrays race in a realist perspective of simply the way the world is, as opposed to in a discursive manner. Channeling Kurt Wilson in his discussion of the essence of W.E.B DuBois’ work The Souls of Black Folks, there is no progressive conversation about what race or culture means, it is only portrayed as what it is in a narrow-minded single story (Wilson, 1999). When a racist subjectivity is melded into a realistic objectivity, racism becomes deeply embedded into perspective and behavior that can be difficult to dismantle and approach discursively as an adult. Without the capacity for a self-reflexive critical approach for interpreting media, young children begin to internalize the media’s implicit negative attitudes about non-white ethnicities. The bombardment of negative representation from the media naturalizes these attitudes in their learning environment, which in turn causes children to make affective associations with nonwhite racial groups that become a part of their programming and attitudes later in life. In
Wampler 7 Prunchic and Lacey’s essay “The Future of Forgetting: Rhetoric, Memory, and Affect”, they discuss “memory [as] a crucial tool for determining the ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ status of personal and cultural knowledge as well as how human desires and belief emerge or are installed in humans” (Prunchnic & Lacey, 2011, pg 474). When the subjective attitudes of a racist society are encoded in prevalent media culture such as Disney, young children decode them as an objective portrayal of reality in terms of beauty and superiority, the issue of racist representation becomes especially dangerous. Although children may grow up and forget the exact content of these Disney Princess films, the subjective experience of viewing a white princess as more beautiful or favorable than a non-white princess becomes programmed into unconscious personal memory that forms implicit biases that surface in their gazes and interactions. Prunchic and Lacey argue that “rhetorical memory will be inextricably bound to our ability to ‘forget’ the content of experiential memory as it becomes stored in information networks and our bodies’ affective response” (Prunchic & Lacey, 2011, pg 474). The body’s affective response may reflect internally, damaging self confidence and perception, or translate externally as microaggressions or discrimination. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s social experiment uncovers the ways in which societal messages about white beauty and desirability affects an individual’s interaction with their identity and the way in which they navigate the world. The “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification” study examined how young African American and Caucasian American children interacted with black and white dolls. When interacting with the black dolls, the children gave the following responses: “looks bad all over”, “looks bad cause it don’t look pretty”, “cause him black – cause his cheeks are colored – it’s ugly” (Clark & Clark, 1950, pg 340). When interacting with the white dolls, the children gave “cause he’s not colored like these – they are the best looking because they are white”, “cause it’s white, it’s pretty”, “cause his feet, hands, ears,
Wampler 8 elbows, knees, and hair are clean” (Clark & Clark, 1950, pg 340). It is not surprising that the children showed preference toward the white doll instead of the black doll; their comments blatantly associate white with cleanliness and beauty while associating black with ugliness and filth. The researchers point out in their discussion of the results that “where the child brings up the subject of race at all, his expressions are indicative of negative attitudes toward the Negro race” (Clark & Clark, 1950, pg 349). With the starkly contrasting dichotomies between the white and black dolls, the white skin tone is implicitly being categorized as good and the darker skin tone as bad. Unfortunately, this attitude seems to be an overarching theme across all the racial groups of participants. Further in the discussion of the research, Kenneth and Mamie point out that “the clear cut rejection of brown as a skin color preference is most marked in dark children, but appears to a considerable extent in all skin color groups and throughout all age levels” (Clark & Clark, 1950, pg 349). In a young stage of life where most children are egocentric, it’s both interesting and disturbing that the group with the highest rate of dark skin rejection was the very group the dolls represented: the darker toned group. The study concludes that “expressing rejection of the brown color point to an emotional conflict centering around some children’s evaluation of their own skin color and particularly their skin color preference” (Clark & Clark, 1950, pg 349). Arguably, the non-white children’s skin color preference is not truly their own, but formed by a lifetime of witnessing white privilege at work in the media as well as in their own lives. This conflict between externally acquired and internally held values can cause a tension that both oppresses non-white groups in the form of societal influence and causes internal oppression in the form of reduced self efficacy. While Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll experiments were conducted in a time of legal segregation and rampant societal racism in the 1950s, evidence of racist sentiments have not only persisted, but extended to other parts of the world via imperialism and colonialism. 40 years after
Wampler 9 the Clark studies and integration, the racial identification and preferences of young black children in Trinidad were analyzed and compared to the children of the Clark studies to find alarmingly similar results. Even though all the participants in the Trinidad study were black, most of the children still displayed preference and claimed to identify more with the black doll. During the interaction with a black doll in the experiment, one child commented “I don’t like being black; I will be rich if I am like the white doll” (Gopaul-McNicol, 1988, pg 191). In this instance, a white skin color is blatantly associated with social status and privilege. The Trinidad study goes to show that the degrading and damaging messages of the American media are not contained to our continent; along with the crusade of the white savior, these messages contaminate the ideologies of other countries. The researcher of the Trinidad study, Sharon-ann Gopaul-McNicol, offers an explanation that “the answer may lie in the perception of the White supremacy fostered by an English colonial system. It is evident that the White bias permeates every facet of cosmopolitan populations” (Gopaul-McNicol, 1988, pg 191) and that “the majority of textbooks fail to deal positively with the contributions made by various races to the growth and development of Trinidad” (Gopaul-McNicol, 1988, pg 191). In this sense, representations and reiterations of white privilege are so powerful that it warped the ideologies and selfperceptions of people that live on a completely different continent where whiteness is not the racial majority. When whiteness is equated with superiority, consequences far beyond damaged selfperceptions and microaggressions can emerge. For example, the Rwandan genocide occurred as a result of the tension between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups instigated by Belgian colonists. When the European colonists arrived, they instituted categorizing systems that segregated individuals based on a racial identity and forced them to carry identity cards. Because the Tutsis generally had a lighter skin tone and a facial structure that more strongly resembled that of
Wampler 10 Caucasians, the Belgian colonists privileged the Tutsis with better vocational and educational opportunities (Rwanda, 2008). Although the two groups speak the same language and practice the same customs, the tension caused by the racial dichotomy of superior and inferior was enough to cause civil chaos that killed 800,000 people in 100 days (Rwanda, 2008). People of all races and skin tones need to be portrayed in a way that credits their worth as human beings if all individuals are to ever be conceptualized and ultimately treated as equal. However, the damaging cycle, in which racist representations influence the attitudes and behavior of children who further produce and perpetuate white privilege for future generations to consume, actively works against any hopes of equality progress. The perpetuating cycle of white hegemony in the media has to be broken, and this change must start in the media and the messages they implant in the minds of children that will affect the evolution of our history as well as the mindsets of future generations. Media conglomerates, such as Disney, that interact with young children in malleable stages of social development need to take responsibility for the harmful culture of thought they endorse. Instead, Disney should utilize their influence and cultural icon status to represent ethnic groups as unique and equal as well as inspire a culture of acceptance.