"All This and Rabbit Stew"

I found this video on You Tube after seeing a list online of racially questionable cartoons from the website http://members.aol.com/wowvideo/rscartoons.htm.

This old cartoon depicts one of the many antics of Bugs Bunny. As this was from the earlier years of the cartoon, it has some racial referencing in it. The episode opens with a little black boy with a gun hunting for a rabbit, moving in a slow, lazy manner. He talks in a way that seems less civilized than the normal white person would talk. Also, the way the boy is depicted offers a crude picture of the African American race. He is shown to be extremely dark in color with large lips that are considerably lighter than the rest of his body. In addition, the boy is shown to not be highly educated. He is fooled numerous times by Bugs Bunny while he is trying to hunt him. I chose this item because it represents racial notions that people have in a simple, elementary manner.

This cartoon is a excellent example of how blacks were depicted in the past and in some ways even today. Not only were older African Americans racialized, but so were young children, as in this cartoon. The slow manner in which the boy walks and talks represents the laziness and carelessness that people of African American descent were thought to hold. Also, the large lips and incredibly dark skin show how the English thought of whites as so much different than themselves. The mere fact that the boy is hunting a rabbit shows the labor that the African American slaves were to exercise for many years. This cartoon brings up the idea that was mentioned in Capitalism, Class, and the Matrix of Domination by Allan G. Johnson, that whites developed the idea of whiteness to justify their treament of blacks and place themselves in a higher social category than those of different race. This cartoon depicts how blacks were placed in a lower social category than whites in the ways listed above. The boy is obviously not of high social standard by the way he walks, talks, and his general image. His image also reminds me of those we saw in our screening of Ethnic Notions, where the caricatures of blacks (typically the black sambo) were happy-go-lucky, extremely dark, had huge lips, and were clearly not as civilized as the whites.

I think that it is sad that a cartoon like All This and Rabbit Stew were ever aired on television. Even though cartoons were once aimed at being viewed by adults, children often watched them as well, and even moreso today. To put these ideas of racial prejudices in a cartoon viewed by so many people of various age groups, races, and genders is, in my opinion, sickening. The fact that these ideas were agreed upon by many and shown in such an elementary way is part of the reason that we still see racial prejudices in our world today. It was once so prevelant that it is hard for people to forget and not send these notions from generation to generation, as it is all they once knew.