White is the One Color You Can’t Have In Cartoons

[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

When Inside Out 2 finally gave Disney a cartoon hit after years of box office bombs, the company’s PR flacks rushed to credit diversity. In reality, the movie was a throwback to the John Lassseter era of Pixar before the animation studio’s master auteur and his alumni were purged. Featuring a girl from a normative two-parent family, and a voice cast loaded with Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Lane, and Amy Poehler, the animated film wasn’t very diverse.

If Inside Out 2 showed anything it was that diverse audiences were not turned off by watching a white family. Being ‘seen’ was not nearly as important as Hollywood’s diversity czars claimed.

Nonetheless Disney felt the need to brag that the number of white moviegoers going to Pixar films had dropped from 50% of the audience to only 34%. Only in woke Hollywood does bragging about how many white people didn’t come to your movie count as a win.

White people have been disappearing from cartoons even as those cartoons have been failing.

The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative overseen by Stacy L. Smith, a white woman who gets paid to watch movies and complain that there are too many white people in them (Smith bills herself as “the foremost disrupter of inequality in the entertainment industry”), issued its latest report boasting that the number of “underrepresented characters” in animated movies had shot up from 8% in 2007 to 67.9% in 2023.

What is the USC AII’s definition of “underrepresented”? According to the report, “all non-white characters were collapsed into an “UR” or underrepresented level.” If underrepresented characters actually make up an overwhelming two-thirds majority of cartoon characters, then are they really under or overrepresented? And if white characters are in the minority, aren’t then white characters the underrepresented ones? Also how does the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative correctly classify the race of cartoon mice, sea creatures and space aliens?

If white people now make up only 32% of characters in animated films and are only 34% of the audience, even though they make up around 60% of the adult population, what that really means is that Hollywood has succeeded in driving away a sizable percentage of its audience.

And it implies that eliminating white characters helped reduce the white audience.

Cartoons are primarily targeted at children. Beginning with Kenneth Mark’s ‘Doll Test’, which played a crucial role in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling which dismantled segregation, the argument has been made that children’s racial preferences when it comes to toys are indicative of racial discrimination. Minority children, we have been told, who don’t see characters of the same race in children’s entertainment will grow up filled with self-hatred. But somehow this argument does not and need not apply to white children.

As of 2022, half of American children were still white and yet two-thirds of animated characters were non-white. This is not representation, but representation was never the goal. The same experts who told us that a lack of role models and characters of the same race is emotionally damaging to children have no problem with emotionally damaging the right sort of children.

The statistical curve for representation was passed in 2016 and yet the DEI forces governing Hollywood and the animation industry, at least in the United States, have continued pressing on past the 50% mark until white characters in cartoons dropped to 40% and then 32% and even that still isn’t enough. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative argues that there is still more work to do. And more work means the further elimination of white characters in Hollywood.

Disney has led the way in race-swapping, de and re-racializing its own classic characters so that they are no longer white in the name of diversity. And diversity never seems to include white people. But it also doesn’t include good stories or compelling narratives which is why audiences of all races have come to associate diversity with poor quality agitprop and virtue signaling.

After Lightyear, Strange World, Wish, Soul and Turning Red, diversity has not been very kind to Disney. Especially the attempt to promote sexual lifestyles to children in Lightyear and Strange World. But Disney’s approach has been to run endless sequels to successful movies, like Inside Out 2, not to mention two Frozen sequels and a fifth Toy Story movie alongside original DEI projects that will be financed by the perpetual sequel machine.

Earlier this year, Disney hired Janice Underwood, Biden’s chief diversity officer, as Vice President of DEI at Disney Experiences, while Tinisha Agramonte serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at The Walt Disney Company. Both celebrated the success of Inside Out 2 on social media although the movie’s success was a renunciation of their work.

Diversity isn’t key to Disney’s success, but diversity is crucial to its failures.

The emphasis on DEI has been associated with a growing exodus of talent on which Disney and any creative industry depends. But with DEI, Disney remains determined to reward any external characteristics using a quota system rather than boosting innate talent. With programs like Stories x Women program, Disney continues promoting a mindless quota diversity over merit and talent. Its Stories x Women program requires not good stories, but stories with a female team leader.

“The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique,” Walt Disney reportedly once said. By contrast, the goal of DEI is to pigeonhole everyone into affinity groups based on general biological characteristics and then to alternately reward or punish them for those characteristics. Disney’s best cartoons spoke to the uniqueness in children, but its DEI projects all too often tell children that the only thing unique about them is their group.