While it's well established these feelings are so common and widely held, I needed to know why. "From the white female protagonist being a light skinned black girl named Roxanne, to the white boy named Bobby (voiced by Pauly Shore) getting in just as much trouble as Max, but somehow feeling way less worried about his parents finding out." It all makes so much sense.Īnnoyed with white people around me not getting it, I put out a feeler on Twitter to speak to more black people about their reasoning and thoughts. The piece argues that from an aesthetic point citing various indicators of the movie's blackness. The only time a black person I talked to about this didn't understand what I was saying were times when we would disagree on which characters are black (Foghorn Leghorn is a major point of contention).Įarlier this year, Noisey published a piece stating A Goofy Movie was a black millennial classic. In fact, I don't know a single black person in my life who hasn't attributed race to non-human characters. In case you're not convinced and think I'm crazy, I'm not even close to the only one who thinks this way. Some Ninja Turtles (Michelangelo, maybe Raphael) Bob from Reboot, Brain from Arthur, the Pink Panther, Elmo-all black. I now have a list of over 20 characters from my childhood that I'm still updating. Soon, I began obsessively updating a memo on my phone of all the characters I felt were black. The best way to describe it would be like a type of synesthesia but for race and cartoons. While Bugs is arguably one of the most widely recognizable cartoon characters of all time, I've known in my heart that many other anthropomorphic characters are black. To me, it's as obvious as anything I've always known. There's no doubt in my mind Bugs Bunny is a black man. Once I explained my vague reasoning (he just is), some understood but I left most of these interactions realizing it wasn't so simple. "No." I responded, "It's a very simple yes or no question."Īfter many conversations that involved white people trying very hard to not to say the wrong thing, someone finally asked how I knew-a question I couldn't really answer. "Is this a trick?" one suspicious white man asked. "Do you think Bugs Bunny is black?" I asked, only for many to not really understand the question. It might not be a widely held understanding for white people, so immediately after talking to my friend about Bugs Bunny being black, I turned to my (admittedly, mostly white) colleagues and asked around. Bugs Bunny is a rabbit, and while he is anthropomorphic, the suspension of disbelief only stretches so far for some people. After thinking about it a bit more, I realized that, for many, this wasn't an inherent fact.
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