Descent into madness (aka Disney World) — Post 2

Dec 22

*Disney has a mixed record on social issues and a disastrous record on worker rights here and abroad.*

NOTE: This week and next week, I’m blogging my experiences in Florida, which includes several days at the anti-worker, pro-corporate mecca Disney World as part of a family trip (which I didn’t want to go on, but was outvoted on). Here are my previous posts: Post 1

I am thoroughly exhausted after two days of 15+k steps running around Disney World, with yesterday being 13 hours’ worth of fun interspersed with waiting, rain, and some social/political issues that came up, most but not all of which was actually positive.

I’m doing a blog post on Days 2 and 3 of our trip to Florida together since I was completely wiped out on Tuesday.

Let’s start out with the bad.

The Peter Pan’s Flight ride still has overtly racist depictions of American Indians. I’m not going to post photos here but you can Google Peter Pan’s Flight if you want to see them. They’re evocative of the same characters in the movie that Disney now displays a warning before on Disney+.
It’s brief, but that makes it even more infuriating because it’d be easy for them to change. These depictions do have an effect on kids in particular, as evidenced by racist chants by kids at a Peter Pan at a separate performance earlier this year. Kids, and their parents, need to know Native Americans aren’t just funny subhuman cartoon characters who wear face pain and feathers and smoke a peace pipe.
A homophobic comment by a guest who was riding the Jungle Cruise (made even more famous by Weird Al’s Skipper Dan). This one obviously isn’t Disney’s fault, but it’s a sad commentary on the state of our country that someone thought they could (and did) get away with this joke.
A little set-up for what happened. The “skipper” giving us the tour of the jungle asked the family in the back of the boat where they were from. Someone who was close to the back on the side (but not actually the back) answered. The skipper jokingly said something along the lines of, “Thank you to the guy who’s not in the back for answering!” Then the guy said, “I now identify as being in the back.”
I started to laugh at first, but then I realized — this has got to have been a jab at the practice of the LGBTQ+ community and allies using pronouns, right??
It just didn’t occur to me at first that someone would make an openly transphobic joke in public in a group they didn’t know, including with a number of kids present.
Should I have said something after the fact once I realized what it was? I’m not sure. It would have drawn more attention to this jerk, might have made me as an ally seem overly sensitive (see, you can’t even make a joke anymore!) and taken away from people’s experience on the ride and left them with a negative, not positive, opinion of using pronouns.
On the other hand, we need people to know that jokes and attitudes like this aren’t okay in 2022, and they weren’t okay before. I wasn’t expecting to be in this situation, and hadn’t really thought about what I would do personally in a situation with someone making jokes or insults about using pronouns. I guess as a heterosexual male working in a relatively liberal workplace and city (Memphis, a blue dot in a red state) I’ve been sheltered from this.
Somewhat positive: Splash Mountain is thankfully being redone in 2023 to change it to being based on The Princess and the Frog, which portrays African Americans in a positive light. The current ride is based on one of the most racist movies of all time, Song of the South (which is the only animated film Disney+ didn’t put on Disney+ it was so bad), based on life just after the Civil War and portraying a Black man embodying a number of stereotypes and depicting a happy life that was really not all that bad back then for African Americans, including telling fond anecdotes from back when there was still slavery.
It shouldn’t have taken this long to correct this historical wrong, but they are doing it — and replacing it with a The Princess and the Frog theme is fitting. While my father-in-law seems to lament them changing it (he said this will be the last time we “get” to ride it) I’m glad for at least some progress on this.
There’s also a very pro-environment vibe in the parks and in several of the attractions we’ve been to so far, in particular in Animal Kingdom, including The Big Blue and Beyond with Nemo and the gang (before the show, environmental facts), Winged Encounters (mentioning the importance of being aware of and taking action on protecting species, including the success story of saving the bald eagle from the edge of becoming extinct), and more.
In addition, at a number of places around the parks there are not just trash cans, and not even just recycle bins, but also compost bins. They also use paper instead of plastic straws, which if everyone did would save billions of tons of plastic and help significantly cut pollution in the oceans. One can definitely fault Disney for many other things related to their environmental policies as a company, but these are public-facing messages that kids see or experience the environment is an important issue.

In my next installment, I’ll talk more about other impressions of Disney so far, including my father-in-law’s Fox-inspired misinformation about non-existent “woke” changes at the park, over priced concessions and souvenirs at every corner, as well as some unexpected positives as well related to underpaid employees who are still going above and beyond in doing their job to help not always pleasant customers.

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