Discrimination And Racism

Discrimination and racism has always been a major part of American history. Whenever new groups of ethnicities immigrated to the United States (US), the general public would discriminate against them and blame them some issues of the time. At first it was the Irish in the mid 19th century, and then the Chinese and Italians during the late 19th century and so on. Still, the group that was the most strongly discriminated against was the African-Americans. They are different from the ethnic groups above because they have been a part of the US since the inception of the country. The fact that most of them were slaves in the outset of the country created a powerful system of racism. Even when slavery was abolished, racism and discrimination …show more content…
Because of the Great Depression, there were rising racial tensions facing African Americans. I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You has a large amount of racism against African-Americans because a lot of its plot revolves around racism. The basic plot of the cartoon, which was directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Fleischer Studios, was an African Tribe captured Betty Boop and Koko and Bimbo needed to rescue her. The initial racism occurs because the depiction of the tribe is a racist caricature of African tribes. The tribesmen have accented facial features that almost make the tribe look like they are crossed with a monkey and all the tribesmen have nose piercings. I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You also has “savage” tribal music playing in the background whenever there is more than one tribesman. Then at a later point in the short, Koko and Bimbo are being chased by one of the tribesman who transforms by the body disappearing and his increasing in size. Then, transforms into Louis Armstrong’s head. Furthermore, during the chase of Koko and Bimbo Louis Armstrong’s floating head was singing the background song for the short “You Rascal You”. This was a powerful depiction of racism because the floating tribesman’s head’s shift into Louis Armstrong’s head is …show more content…
Well before the 1950s, African-Americans had been advocating more civil rights. A year prior to Southern Fried Rabbit being made, there was a successful boycott of the gas station bathrooms in Mississippi, so they were desegregated. It also showed civil disobedience can work. More importantly, a year after the cartoon was created, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Brown in Brown v. Board of Education, and the beginning of segregated schools being illegal. Thus, some of the racial tension began to subside and cartoons reflected it with the use of less racist