Cartoons and Classification

Here is an image of a raced, classed and gendered body.  The cartoon above is from Disney's “Kim Possible” where the main character is a white body and many of the characters are white bodies, but above is the protagonists only colored body friend.  She is seemingly classed lower than other bodies due to her eating mannerisms, i.e. opening her mouth wide and eating with her hands because this would not be how someone who is dignified and refined would eat.  Also, since she is a girl, she is supposed to act properly for the sole reason because she is a girl.  The image is ironic as this black body is eating fried chicken as black history month is streamed across the television, but it also gives off an underlying racist tone.  It is a little comical but at the same time we, as a society, start to divide and classify.

Stuart Hall, cultural theorist and sociologist, tells that in our society, classifying is cognitive.  It is a cultural impulse to classify things and people.  So as you view the Disney show, all the white bodies are there, which is natural, but as soon as the colored body makes an appearance, it is a “matter out of place”.  This awkward placement is strange and different so it must be “cleansed” and put back.  For example, a wild animal in your home is something that is out of place.  It belongs out in the wild not in the home. 

Hall discusses the term “inscribed”, in context to what we automatically think when a notion is placed in the mind.  For some reason when we think of black bodies, the image of that becomes synonymous with fried chicken, watermelons, etc.  The white body is what is thought to be “neutral”.  Richard Dyer, claims that the white body is the natural body and therefore we do not take a racial perspective from them.  So it is although as if whenever we classify other bodies it is through the “neutral” white body. 

So as we look at the image and giggle at the irony, we are also reminded of how we have come to this view in the first place and we realize that it is outright racism.  It is a subtle racism, but nonetheless it is.  Society can view this and accept that this is a black body doing what black bodies do since this is how we have come to view it. The racism is almost considered acceptable because this has become our worldly view and of the bodies that are a part of it.