#376. Waiting Nearly 100 Years for a Black Disney Princess

The wait is finally over. After patiently waiting nearly a century to see it, Black people will finally enjoy the sight of a Black princess in a Walt Disney film, with the November 25 release of The Princess and the Frog:

"Move over Snow White. Make room for Disney’s first black princess.

With America’s first African-American president in the White House, Disney is counting on an African-American princess to be a big hit in Hollywood.

But even though The Princess and the Frog isn’t released until later this year, it is already stirring up controversy.

For while Princess Tiana and many in the cartoon cast are black – the prince is not.

Which has led some critics to complain that Disney has ducked the opportunity for a fairytale ending for a black prince and princess.

While some have hailed Disney’s decision as a reflection of melting pot America, others say the company is sending out a mixed message.

Although the black princess’s love interest in the new animated musical is called Prince Naveen of Maldonia and is voiced by a Brazilian actor, he looks more white than black in photographs from the film that Disney have released.

Since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, all of Disney’s princesses have predominantly been white.

A native Indian princess was featured in Pocahontas and Jasmine in Aladdin had a Middle Eastern appearance."

Analyst are unsure if this movie will play with a global audience, for as we found out earlier Black people don't like their own hair and do everything they can to make it appear like a white persons locks, but the ebony Disney princess appears to be of perhaps 1/4 or 1/8 African ancestry. Thus, can she really be an authentically Black princess, when her features are oh so white?:

"The Frog Princess is the first animated film to be conceived since Disney's 2006 acquisition of Pixar Animation Studios, the computer animation house that created such blockbusters as Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and Cars.

The use of a classic hand-drawn process may be an indication Disney intends to create two streams of animation — one computer based, one based on more classic techniques.

Randy Newman, who created music for Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Cars, will write the score.

John Musker and and Ron Clements, who co-directed The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Hercules, wrote the story and will direct the film, which is set in New Orleans.

"The film's New Orleans setting and strong princess character give the film lots of excitement and texture," Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook said.

The heroine, Maddy, becomes the first African American among the Disney princesses, who are collectively responsible for more than $3 billion in annual retail sales.

Disney abandoned hand-drawn animation after 2004's Home on the Range, one of a series of animated films that provided poor returns.

The company bought Pixar, known for its computer-generated imagery, and gave Pixar's John Lasseter creative control of animated features.

Analysts said Disney may be retesting hand-drawn works with The Frog Princess with the idea of producing more films using the classic animation process that launched the original Disney studios."

A hand-drawn cartoon coming out in an era of James Cameron's Avatar and other computer animated movies, such as Pixar's Toy Story 3, might be bit of a stretch, considering Disney's last hand-drawn film - Home on the Range - made a whopping $50 million at the domestic box office (compared to Pixar's Up, which made $292 million).

Black people might not like the answer to this question, but are they being used in an attempt to regenerate interest in Disney's traditional money-making behemoth (hand-drawn animated films)?

After all, it will be primarily Black people in the audience of The Princess and the Frog, for this is who the movie is appealing to (interesting the setting for the film is everyone's favorite chocolate city, New Orleans).

The movie has already generated interest in one strange area for Black people, as Halloween costumes of the nubian princess are flying off the shelves and being purchased by Black parents for their Black children, in the vain hope that they will want to play with Black dolls instead of white ones:

"Fifty years after psychologist Kenneth Clark conducted the doll test that was used to help make the case for desegregation in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, a 17-year-old filmmaker redid the social experiment and learned that not much has changed.

In the 1954 test, Clark showed children a black doll and a white doll and asked black children which doll they preferred. The majority chose the white. The findings were not surprising for the time. In the summer of 2005, Kiri Davis, a high-school teen, sat with 21 black kids in New York and found that 16 of them liked the white doll better.

"Can you show me the doll that you like best?" Davis asked a black girl in the film. The girl picked the white doll immediately. When asked to show the doll that "looks bad," the girl chose the black doll. But when Davis asked the girl, "Can you give me the doll that looks like you?" the black girl first touched the white doll and then reluctantly pushed the black doll ahead.

The film has left audiences across the country stunned and has reignited a powerful debate over race."It's amazing that two generations after the 'Black Is Beautiful' mantra of the 1960s, some African Americans still believe that it's not," Monroe Anderson wrote in the blog MultiCultClassics.

"It's amazing that four decades after James Brown's chart-topper, 'I'm Black and I'm Proud,' so many African Americans aren't. It's amazing that in the same year hip-hop artist Kanye West told the world that 'President Bush doesn't care about black people,' Davis was discovering that neither do shorties in Harlem."

One blogger thinks that when black girls try to bleach their skin or black kids pick white dolls as a better-looking toy, it is merely a reflection of the societal stereotype. This stereotype is continually reinforced."

SBPDL is going to lapse into a prediction: The Princess and the Frog will make roughly $125 million at the domestic box office, flop in Europe and be a relative hit in South America. Black people will flock to the film like single women did to Titanic and testosterone fueled guys did to 300.

However, the merchandise wing of Disney will profit nicely off the ethnocentrism that Black people rightly feel for this film, as they will buy their kids every conceivable piece of flair that promotes this movie:

"This Halloween, 4.5 million girls will dress up as a princess, according to a recent survey from the National Retail Federation. More than a few of them will be a Disney princess, a category that ranks seventh on this year's list of top 10 costumes for kids.

Cinderella has been a perennial favorite, but this season, there's another princess on the rise. Princess Tiana, Disney's first new princess in 10 years, is also the brand's first African-American princess. The movie, "The Princess and the Frog," is a musical fairy tale in which Tiana, a girl from New Orleans, voiced by actress Anika Noni Rose, is mistaken for a princess by a frog prince who asks her to kiss him to break the spell. Though the film does not arrive in theaters until Dec. 11, Tiana Halloween costumes are already a hot property. And in an unusual twist, the character is resonating more with adults than with little girls.

Deidra Willis, 31, went through great pains to track down a Tiana costume for her 2-year-old daughter, Daylin. At one store, the costume was already sold out. At a another, she saw no trace of Princess Tiana. A friend was finally able to locate a costume at yet another retailer, Willis said. Good thing, because Willis was just about ready to create her own version of the outfit based on images from the movie trailer.

Disney Consumer Products representatives confirmed they have received calls from customers looking for the sold-out costumes. Sales, they said, have exceeded expectations, especially since the film has yet to be released. Willis typically doesn't celebrate Halloween, but this year, Princess Tiana was a good enough reason to start.

"I am very passionate about this particular Disney character," Willis said. "It has been 100 years in the making. I've been very disturbed because I love the concept of a princess, but they don't exist for the African-American community."

The excitement extends well beyond Halloween. Willis, like many parents of African-American girls, has taken a hard line on Disney products. She has avoided filling her daughter's toy box with too many princess products that don't reflect her image. The only other Disney-themed product she has purchased are Pull-Ups, but she has plans to scoop up more of the Tiana merchandise.

"I'm looking for Tiana dolls. I want pajamas and slippers. When I go to get her toddler bed from Toys 'R' Us, I want a Tiana bed to be there," Willis said.

If interest in Tiana merchandise is to be expected, so much early interest is less the norm. Usually, it's kids begging their moms to buy them princess this or that, but Tiana has moms all aflutter.

Nicole Nobles' 5-year-old daughter, Jaida, opted to be a cheerleader for Halloween this year (she had been a Disney princess for three years running, including Snow White and Cinderella), but Nobles can't wait to buy a Tiana doll for her daughter this holiday season.

"I refuse to put Sleeping Beauty on her bed," said Nobles, of Jonesboro. "I heard about Tiana, and I said 'Oh we are definitely going to get that one.' "

A Princess Tiana cookbook for kids, Tiana Band-Aids, a calendar, apparel and plush toys are already available for purchase online and at mass retailers. A Princess Tiana-inspired wedding gown, part of the Kirstie Kelly for Disney Fairy Tale Weddings collection, will be available this spring.

It is unusual to see so much merchandise hitting the market two months in advance of the film, said Suzanne Diamond, a marketing lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and president of Diamond Group Ltd. The early in-store arrival of Tiana products is in part an effort to get the merchandise on shelves for holiday shopping season.

"You would normally time it for the merchandise to hit at the same time as the movie, maybe slightly before, so you can capitalize on all the excitement and extend the brand," she said. "This is fascinating because this is really driven by the moms. This is very significant to the moms and it is word of mouth."

While the $4 billion Disney Princess brand is supported by a massive marketing strategy (which should begin in a few weeks for Tiana products), the buzz already generated by blogs and other less traditional forms of advertising helped Carol's Daughter sell out of "A Magical Beauty Collection" gift sets in just seven hours online, said the company's founder, Lisa Price. Price, who collaborated with Disney on the line of shampoo, conditioner, detangler and bubble bath, said she sees similarities between Tiana's story and her own and that may be part of the appeal for women.

"I feel like this story has a story that goes beyond the film. Tiana is someone who has the support of her family and her family encourages her to live out her dreams. ... That is a beautiful lesson," Price said.

Pre-Obama America is dead. Welcome to the coronation of a new princess for a new nation, conceived in the proposition that all colored people are equal, and all white people must bow down to this decree.

Cinderella, Snow White, Bell (Beauty and the Beast) and Sleeping Beauty are so 20th century, and will one day appear in a list of most racist Disney characters - like this one - as a symbol of white people attempting to instill the archetype of beauty upon the beleaguered colored masses of the world - even though Black people love white dolls.

Stuff Black People Don't Like includes waiting nearly 100 year for a Black Disney princess, for every princess since Walt Disney conceived Mickey Mouse should have been Black, and it is an absolute joke that we had to wait until 2009 to be graced with the beauty of an obviously Octoroon princess.

When all is said and done, Black people will still probably scream that The Princess and the Frog is racist and demand another princess be drawn to raise self-esteem among young Black girls.

A trailer for the film can be viewed here.

#28. Driving While Black

Black people are known to be primarily afraid of three things: Dogs, Ghosts and Registered Mail. Interestingly, the fourth thing that Black people fear the most is Driving While Black (DWB), or the idea that:

"Driving While Black" is a word play on the name of a real US crime, driving while intoxicated. The phrase implies that a motorist may be pulled over by a police officer simply because he or she is black, and then questioned, searched, and/or charged with a trivial offense. This concept stems from a long history of racism in the United States. The term refers to racial profiling, which is said to be used by police and other law enforcement officials."

Black people are stricken with fear by canines, the thought of an apparition or evil spectre haunting their night and the dreaded registered mail delivered via the USPS, FedEx or UPS. Yet, Black people are almost incapable of leaving their homes to drive to the supermarket because they have to turn the ignition on in their vehicle and brave the roads that are protected by agents of the dreaded "The MAN" - his police.

Like the stormtroopers from Star Wars, the police prey upon only those who are DWB and will selectively enforce in areas that have a small minority of Black drivers, thereby ensnaring our melanin-rich friends in a horrible scam that is condoned because the Black driver could have been a rouge.

Why are Black people the subject of so many of "The MAN's" agents of Black disemprowment? Rober McNeilly, Jr., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's police chief, was quoted as saying:

"Why aren't the proportions exactly the same? McNeilly, a compact, muscled white man who has decent relations with black leaders in town, says class, not race, is the answer. "Poor neighborhoods have drugs being sold, disorderly conduct, gangs, trash being thrown on the street, fights, loud music. So police will make more stops in those areas," he says. He notes that he "constantly" gets requests from black neighborhoods for more — not fewer — cops to patrol the streets"

That same article tells us that:

"According to the latest federal figures,

1. blacks are 12% of the U.S. population but;
   
2. account for 27% of all sexual-assault convictions,
   
3. 66% of all robbery convictions and
   
4. 38% of all fraud and embezzlement convictions.

With that in mind, Heather Mac Donald was quoted as saying:

"...a 1998 study in a journal called Accident Analysis and Prevention showing that in 1973, 1986 and 1996, in random surveys of thousands of drivers across the U.S., African Americans were more likely than whites to fail breath tests for alcohol..."in Illinois, blacks have a higher motorist-fatality rate than whites."

So, according to the data at hand, Black people drive drunk at rates higher than white people and they commit a disproportionate large percentage of crime:

• “[Blacks] are eight times more likely than people of other races to rob someone, for example, and 5.5 times more likely to steal a car.”
• Charges of racial profiling, which maintain that police target innocent black motorists for traffic stops notwithstanding, a 2002 study by Maryland’s Public Service Research Institute found that police were stopping too few black speeders (23%), compared to their proportion of actual speeders (25%). In fact, “blacks were twice as likely to speed as whites” in general, and there was an even higher frequency of black speeders in the 90-mph and higher range.

Yet, "hate facts" aside, cops are still compelling Black people to shy away from driving cars and instead herding them on public transportation, such as buses and urban rail lines, like MARTA in Atlanta and the Metro in DC. To Black people, solid data, empirical evidence, qualitative and qualified analysis mean little when compared to the undeniable reality of the racial nature of the facts and the unpleasant truth they might lead to, so those "facts" must be denied constantly and anyone who uses them is a "racist".

A recent study of Huntsville, Alabama traffic tickets uncovered some horrifying facts that will further impede Black people from getting back behind the wheel of the car:

"More than half of the traffic tickets in Hunstville go to blacks, even though the city's population is less than one-third black, leading a community activist to complain of racial profiling...Police said the numbers are the result of targeting enforcement in areas where data shows most fatal crashes occur, which also happen to be predominantly black neighborhoods.

The Census Bureau said Huntsville's population is 31.5 percent black, 62.5 percent white and 5.9 percent other races. From June 2006 to June 2008, the Huntsville Police Department issued 43,322 traffic citations, with 39 percent given to whites, 55 percent to blacks and 6 percent to other races."

Naturally, the article bemoans the horrible practice of Driving While Black, but then the ugly head of "Hate Facts" returns to the picture:

"80 percent of all traffic deaths occurred in the north and west precincts, where many predominantly black neighborhoods are located."We're not targeting people," Hudson said. "We're targeting areas where people are dying in crashes. The bottom line is this: Our traffic enforcement is targeted toward locations and driving behaviors that kill people."

Driving While Black (DWB) is a major part of Stuff Black People Don't Like, for Black people fear that police are wrongfully persecuting them en mass and racial profiling only Black people, a draconian practice in Post-Obama America. Regardless, "Hate Facts" once again rear their ugly head and reinforce the reality behind why DWB is a problem at all: Because Black people are behind the wheel to begin with at all.

#400. Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

Michael Bay has made a number of movies that Black people love to see. Those titles include The Rock, Armageddon, Bad Boys, Bad Boys II, Transformers and Pearl Harbor. He has endeared himself to Black people for casting Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as cool cops in the Bad Boys franchise, roles which are denied to white people because white cops are never cool in real life or movies. In movies, white cops are always evil racists that want to restore Jim Crow laws to America. Or, white cops in movies are the comedic fodder for their funnier, cooler Black counterpart.

Black people however, were none to pleased with Mr. Bay's latest offering, the horribly conceived film, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. The movie made a fortune at the box office its first day out - $60 million - which will ensure another horrid sequel, but critics were not to thrilled about the cinematic value of the film.

Regardless, Black people and most white reviewers of the film are in agreement: Transformers 2 is a vile piece of Hollywood fat, tossed to the masses so that they can gnaw on the inedible movie that showcases the "talents"of Meghan Fox - her looks - and the highly annoying Shia LaBeouf.

Black people - who are known for making a lot noise in the theater - have been up in arms though for the inclusion of two new robots in the film, Mudflap and Skids. In the words of one reviewer:

"If you snoop around movie sites today, you’ll find references to Mudflap and Skids, twin Autobots from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen who bear more than a passing resemblance to minstrel show depictions of African Americans. CHUD.com aptly dubbed them Little Black Sambots. The wider story is that Mudflap and Skids are just the tip of the insensitive iceberg in Bay’s newest film."

The so-called Little Black Sambots, are just robots - good guys who fight for the side of justice against the evil robots - were largely in the film for comic relief and never did anything that resembled courageous action. They just loitered in the background of the action a lot. The Little Black Sambots display Black people characteristics and mannerisms.

One reviewer wrote:

Mudflap and Skidz - the aforementioned “from da hood” Autobots with gold teeth, poor grammar, the inability to read (or speak with inside voices) and, final sigh, actual simian features. The voice work (by Spongebob Squarepants’ Tom Kenny) is more of the Howard Stern/Amos & Andy style as opposed to the Chris Rock “daaaaaamn!” variety."

Perhaps a better explanation of the two Black person inspired robots can be found here:

"The characters in question are Skids and Mudflap, who after an initial appearance as a ratty old ice cream truck are upgraded to be green and orange Chevys. More to the point, both characters speak with voices that sound like urban black stereotypes, have big ears and buck teeth and proclaim that they ‘don’t do much readin’‘. Skids even has a gold tooth."

Yes, the Black robots in Transformers 2 are based off of the urban Black male, and yes, Black people are aghast that this would be how Black robots are depicted in the film. To quote Kurtz,"the horror, the horror." One of the Black 'bots even has "grillz".Black people love to act Black, but they don't like to have a mirror held up so that they can see how their actions look on film. It hurts their feelings.

One of the Black person inspired robots does actually say, "don't do much readin," which must be inspired by the literacy rate in Detroit, where reportedly 50 percent of the population can't read.

Black people are horrified when reality is shown on film, instead of a fabricated lie and the portrayal of Black robots is just too much truth for the Black community. The negative depiction of Black robots is a disgusting reminder of the brutal truth Black people have been trying to suppress: that Black people aren't all as articulate and charming as Barack Obama.

Michael Bay has done a disservice to the Black community. He has shown Black people what Black robots would be like, and that is just something that can only be found in Stuff Black People Don't Like.

#70. The Word Niggardly

Black people love words. There’s no getting around it. From “bling” to “booty” to “drive-by shooting,” Blacks have undoubtedly enriched the American English vocabulary. Incredible athletic achievements aside, Black people's top contribution to the American experiment is undoubtedly the new words that have flown smoothly into the vernacular. “You straight trippin dog,” to a new version of "for real" - which Black people say "fizzule".

We can credit Black people for their linguistic achievements—Flava Flav and Mike Tyson come immediately to mind - as top notch, verbose, representatives for their community.

Yet despite their creative knack for inventing slang, pidgins, and complex poetic genres like graffiti and human beatboxing, Blacks tend to be a little wary of Standard English words that contain six or more letters, especially if those words are combined together. Compound words like porch-monkey (the movie Clerks II tries to show white people taking porch monkey back) really throw Blacks into a rage, and they’re known to thereby justify any act of violence against anyone unfortunate enough to say these or other words that discomfort or confuse them.

Black people, however, do not like the word "niggard" or its more common usage, “niggardly,” for example. “Niggardly” means a miser, someone who is stingy. But for Blacks, “niggard” means…well, you know what it means. Black people automatically assume using the word niggardly is a racial pejorative, when in fact it is a fine word to denote someone who is parsimonious, primarily in tipping.

In fact, many white people have used the term "niggardly" before at their job, in a mulitracial setting, and found themselves deprived of that vocation soon thereafter.

Strange though, the etymology of the word "niggard" derives from 1366:

1366, nygart, of uncertain origin. The suffix suggests Fr. origin (cf. dastard), but the root word is probably related to O.N. hnøggr "stingy," from P.Gmc. *khnauwjaz (cf. Swed. njugg "close, careful," Ger. genau "precise, exact"), and to O.E. hneaw "stingy, niggardly," which did not survive in M.E.

Numerous uproars have occurred over the term "niggardly", most recently David Howard:

"David Howard, the white director of a Washington D.C. municipal agency [..] told his staff that, in light of budget cutbacks, he would have to be "niggardly" with funds. An uproar followed that resulted in Howard's resignation, which was accepted by Mayor Anthony Williams on the grounds that Howard had shown poor judgment.

Even some of the commentators who admitted that they knew that "niggardly" has no relation to "nigger" (the origins of the first word predate those of "nigger" by about 300 years) still condemned Howard. They were answered by the columnist Tony Snow, who wrote, "David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who

a) didn't know the meaning of the word 'niggardly'

b) didn't know how to use a dictionary to discover the word's meaning and

c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance."

"Niggardly" sounds, to the Black ear, too much like the term "nigger" or "nigga", which Black people are allowed to say to each other, but White people cannot. A white person saying the word "niggardly" or "nigga", let alone the mother of all hate words, "nigger" is grounds for expulsion from work, or in some cases, death.

Equipped with a biological capacity for language which rivals that of macaws (Zulu and other Bantu languages average about 20,000 documented words, while English and French have several hundred thousand), Blacks tend to overlook troublesome letters and simply go with their instincts. This leads not only to their extraordinary talent for misconstruing harmless phrases or words - like niggardly -, but also to their ability to create nonsensical words out of thin air, giving them an undeniable edge in scatting, freestyle rap, and slam poetry.

#69. The Brown Paper Bag Test

Black people would like the world to believe that they truly are a universal brotherhood representing peace, tolerance and hope.

A Black man was just elected President of the United States running largely as the candidate who promoted change and tolerance. Black people voted overwhelming for him - 96 percent of Black voters nationwide voted for Barack Hussein Obama - giving the impression that Black people have a monolithic view on everything. However, this view is wrong when looking at the history of Black people, from Haiti to Black on Black crime in America.

Worse though for Black people, is the Brown Paper Bag Test. Black people do not like to talk about this sordid historical reminder that Black people can be prejudicial, because it is a well known fact that only White people can be racist and bigoted.

The Brown Paper Bag Test is said to have originated in slave days, and the impetus behind it was that light skinned Black people were more favorable than dark skinned Black people:

"According to an article written by Audrey Elisa Kerr, an associate English professor at Southern Connecticut State University, light-skinned slaves-particularly women-were considered "gentler, kinder, more handsome, smarter, and more delicate" than darker-skinned slaves."

Black people not only encountered racism from White people in the 19th century and 20th century, but from light-skinned Black People as well. The article continues:

"Washington, D.C., once played a large role in the dark-skin/light-skin game. Because slavery did not have such an economic impact in the District, many free blacks preferred to reside in the area. In the mid-19th century, barbershops began accommodating only light-skinned black men.

Not only was race a factor, but skin tone became one. Churches, schools and various organizations utilized the paper bag test for social verification. There were also multitudes of brown bag parties, clubs, and social circles."

Bill Maxwell, a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times decries the problem of the Brown Paper Bag Test as 'colorism', writing:

"Elite blacks of the early 20th century were fair-skinned almost to the person. Even today, most blacks in high positions have fair skin tones, and most blacks who do menial jobs or are in prison are dark. Believe it or not, popular black magazines, such as Ebony as Essence, prefer light-skinned models in their beauty product ads."

Black people are rightly appalled by this historical blip in their clean record of racial bias or hatred, but the record clearly indicated that Black people discriminate against each other, based on the lighter skin pigmentation of some Blacks compared to the higher level of melanin in others.



Henry Louis Gates, a Black professor, tells a story of the Brown Paper Bag Test:

"Some of the brothers who came from New Orleans held a "bag party.' As a classmate explained it to me, a bag party was a New Orleans custom wherein a brown paper bag was stuck on the door. Anyone darker than the bag was denied entrance

The Brown Paper Bag Test is included in Stuff Black People Don't Like for reasons that should now be fairly obvious: Black people are immune from the charge of racism or holding negative view of other races. The Brown Paper Bag Test would prove otherwise.