The fact that I am seriously thinking about the new Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog” is indication that I really need to get a life. My sister is one of the Black parents who wrote Disney for years looking for a Black princess. This sister took me to see “Tales of the South” which came from the stories of Joel Chandler Harris of Eatonton, Georgia.
Eatonton, Georgia, has the historic significance of having an ancient Native American Rock Eagle. The monument is surrounded by a 4-H camp and the tower overlooking the giant rock eagle is where I had one of my first real kiss. No, the girl did not turn into a frog.
We now know that Harris’s Uncle Remus cloaked racism designed to plant seeds of continued subjugation in our little Black heads under our big afros—not real; I just felt like being radical. That movie was cool with me at the time. Eatonton’s other famous author is Alice Walker gave the world The Color Purple. When I was young, we wondered why Walker “had to” marry a white guy until we learned that her husband was one of the attorneys who would get civil rights workers out of jail in Mississippi at great risk to himself. Later, we wondered why Walker “was kicking it” with singer Tracy Chapman. Like most people, if I spent more time minding my business and staying out of other people’s business, I would be better off.
Okay, I had a crush on Walker with her sexy dreads back in the day. You know the Street Committee says “Black don’t crack” and the list of famous Black women my friends and I still wonder about being “too old to date” is long…how old are Lena Horne and Diane Carroll again.
I was told a coworker that a sister in the office did not need to be a peanut, watermelon, or cotton princess because she was an African queen before we arrived in America. But, my biological sister and many other professional Black mothers are deep into this Disney princess stuff for their daughters like fathers wanting their sons to play for the Gators, Bulldogs, or Irish rather than Howard or FAMU. Are they living vicariously through their children?
In college, I heard that Walt Disney had race issues and the witches and villains in some of those movies seem to have anti-Semitic undertones. Anyway, I have to tell my niece her name Maddy will not be the name for the new Disney princess as earlier planned; It has been changed to Tiana. Blame President Barrack Hussein Obama for that since he leads the liberal media and the Hollywood elite.
Maybe I am being overly sensitive but I never really like referring to the Kennedy era as Camelot or to the Obama era as New Camelot. We are in a democracy with no kings, queens and royalty. While there were and are African kings and queens, some of the those leaders were as psychotic as the detested colonialists. If that movie was correct, the great Shaka Zulu buried many people alive with his dead mother Nandi so she would have servants in the next life.
During the mourning period Shaka ordered that no crops should be planted during the following year, no milk (the basis of the Zulu diet at the time) was to be used, and any woman who became pregnant was to be killed along with her husband. Massacres were carried out of those deemed insufficiently grief-stricken, though it wasn’t restricted to them, and cows were slaughtered so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like. You can keep your royalty.
Who Needs a Black Princess Anyway? We All Do – BV Black Spin
Interesting…..particularly the Eatonton, Ga segment……wasn’t aware….Thanks