Saturday, March 3, 2007
SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS
I wander in and out of the room in which my son is watching Saturday morning cartoons as I try to cram a week's worth of cleaning and laundry into one morning. I am grateful for the opportunity to work uninterrupted, but guilty that he is being left with the television as a sitter. I keep an eye on the screen, ready to adjust the channel if a violent show appears. And then it happens.
I am vaguely aware of the characters on the screen. At first they were typical cartoon characters drawn to resemble school kids, but stylized in a way that makes them pop from the screen and appear more exciting than the kids I see walking the halls of our elementary school. The kids on this cartoon are cool and the ones who are not cool are crazy or exciting in their appearance.
Somewhere in the storyline, part of the group forms a band and works to perform at at upcoming concert. In the midst of their preparations, some portion of the group becomes blue -- from head to toe blue -- and in doing so become the coolest kids in the entire school. After this life changing experience, the cool blue kids down want to have anything to do with the plain white kids and don't allow them to play in their band. The leftover white kids are forces to spend their time practicing their instruments, rather than doing all the cool things to blue kids are doing. When the day of the concert arrives, the cool blue kids are booed off the stage because their music was horrible and the plain white kids were grooving the school. A moral lesson, I guess.
Perhaps this was a message about practicing and doing your homework, but deep within it was a message about racism and judgements about others based on purely physical characteristics. I wonder exactly where my son is getting messages about racism, and I am concerned that in the end the plain white kids come out on top, despite the reverse of colors that was adopted in the script. I'm not sure my child is up to making all the mental leaps to understand that it is no better to be blue than to be white, just like it is no better to be white than to be black or brown.
Maybe it was just a cartoon about practicing. Maybe I am straining to see racism in the world around me. Definitely this race question is more complex than I ever imagined.
