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Comment by KSteffensen | Hacker News Reader

The same content warning has been added to 'Aladdin' (the 1992 cartoon, not the Will Smith shameless money grab).

I'm wading into shark-filled waters here but could someone please explain the racist bits of Aladdin to me?

A quick Google found me: "It mispronounces Arab words including “Allah,” depicts nonsense scribble instead of real Arabic script, and codes its characters to reinforce racist and Islamophobic tropes. Main characters that the audience is meant to admire, like Aladdin and Jasmine, have Western features, lighter skin, and American accents, while nefarious or impoverished characters like Jafar and shopkeepers have beards, hooked noses, and thick, Middle Eastern accents."

90s parents were relieved it was just nonsense scribble and not some secret sex-related easter egg. Society's sources of moral outrage have morphed a bit.

It would be an interesting to do a quality redub and maybe even a touch up to the animation just to see how it came out.

I mean, it really couldn't be worse from an entertainment standpoint than the live remakes, right?

Aladdin was obviously not intended to be racist and was probably made by people with good intentions. The same could be said of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Song of the South. But 1992 was a dramatically more racist and reactionary era than 2021, and the 1992 film really is unacceptably racist to show to children.

It is impossible to ignore that Jasmine/Aladdin both have light skin, European faces, and American accents, whereas Jafar and all the hostile guards or street merchants are grotesque Arab caricatures. Seriously - the only Arab “accents” come from bad guys, they tend to have huge hooked or bulbous noses and very dark skin, and they’re all psychotically violent. Most of the references to Arab culture are superficial and rely on stereotypes for cheap laughs (watch the opening scene with the merchant again).

> But 1992 was a dramatically more racist and reactionary era than 2021

No, IMO, it wasn't.

It was a dramatically less antiracist era, which isn't the same thing.

(That is, active racism wasn't much more prevalent in 1992, and maybe even less prevalent, but active antiracism—especially in the US concerning targeted groups other than blacks—was much less prevalent.)

You are just wrong: in the early 90s 55% of US whites were opposed to interracial marriage (compared to 13% opposition in 2013) [1]. In my view this one shocking and outrageous stat is enough to refute your point. But also look at the political world then. Ron Paul was selling virulently racist propaganda in 1992 while serving as a representative [2]. Someone simply could not get away with that today - even Steve Scalise would call for them to be expelled from the House. In 1990 David Duke came dangerously close to becoming a US senator (after serving four years as a representative) and in 1992 was still very powerful in LA politics. This was the era that Rush Limbaugh rose to great fame (and he certainly had the most racist major radio program the country had seen since the 60s). Hatred towards homosexuals was standard - it was rare even for even snooty liberal art films to treat gay people like human beings (showing off drag queens was representation enough).

The country has become more progressive since then (despite the Republicans specifically becoming more reactionary on the whole).

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul_newsletters

> in the early 90s 55% of US whites were opposed to interracial marriage

In the early 90s, roughly 80% of whites were opposed to laws against interracial marriage, but a larger share thought “disapproved” of it. Was that racism, or an assessment of it's viability based on life experience of older adults growing up a society where racism had always been prevalent? A hint might be that it wasn't until the mid-1990s that Black support for interracial marriage started climbing from where it had been since the 1970s. [0][1]

> . In 1990 David Duke came dangerously close to becoming a US senator (after serving four years as a representative) and in 1992 was still very powerful in LA politics.

And in 2000 his superior performance with his appeal to his white supremacist base was explicitly cited by Donald J. Trump when he dropped his bid for the Reform Party nomination—before reinventing himself politically and coming back 16-years later using the same tactics and appeal to the same ideals to win first a major party nomination and then the Presidency.

Whites in America seem to think that racism continued being less of a problem over time through to today, but for blacks, in a number of areas, that perception increased starting in the late 1990s. [2]

> The country has really become dramatically more progressive since then (despite the Republicans specifically becoming more reactionary on the whole).

I think that's arguably true, but only in a way consistent with my description earlier: it is much more that (a significant subset of) the not-racist segment has become much more actively anti-racist than that the country has become less racist. This has also resulted in racial issues being much more polarizing.

[0] https://igpa.uillinois.edu/programs/racial-attitudes

[1] https://igpa.uillinois.edu/sites/igpa.uillinois.edu/files/ra...

[2] https://igpa.uillinois.edu/sites/igpa.uillinois.edu/files/ra...

Aladdin and the Muppet Show are both great. Maybe Disney’s warning system can be used as a filter for finding the best content on the platform?

That’s kind of like my “banned from Twitter” filter for deciding who a cultural leader is. (Not necessarily a good leader, but a leader nonetheless.)

Sort of like r/ControversialClub

> the Will Smith shameless money grab

I have yet to come up with any explanation besides racism for why the live action Aladdin, and specifically the casting of Smith as the Genie, is the thing among all the recent live-action Disney remake films and TV recyclings that is disproportionately singled out for this treatment. I mean, sure Disney is a particularly aggressive money making machine and this description is accurate for basically everything they ever do, but why this one gets singled out above all others?

I'm not singling out Aladdin.

IMO all the live action remakes are shameless money grabs. Remakes in general are creative bankruptcy. Very rarely do they bring something new to the table.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reel_Bad_Arabs

The line “it’s barbaric but hey it’s home. “

> the Will Smith shameless money grab

Did you watch it? It's actually not bad. It's different—and honestly, the parts where it holds too closely to the original are probably the weakest bits. When it does its own thing, it ends up being fun to watch. I still miss Gilbert Gottfried, though.

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