Coonskin, Civil Rights, and the “Period of Acute Racial Sensitivity”

The most significant revision on A Frown Upside Down, aside from a new introduction, has been cutting my significant chapter on Bakshi's Coonskin. Instead, I've trimmed down my discussion of the film into a single section in the larger subsequent chapter on Song of the South in the 1980s and discourses of Reaganism. Understandably, going from forty-plus pages to fewer than ten hasn't been easy (actually, the original draft I submitted to my adviser two years ago was closer to 60 pages). But I think I successfully trimmed the discussion down to that which affects Song of the South the most. Anyway, here's the draft, which I've spent the last three days on fine-tuning:

“If we have to stop making movies that offend anyone, we’ll all be making Disney movies.”
—Coonskin Producer Albert S. Ruddy (1975)

Like many classic Hollywood re-releases, Song of the South had been largely uncontroversial in the 1970s. With a range of contemporary social issues still unresolved, detractors often saw its persistence, at worst, as an unfortunate, but hardly surprising, continuing annoyance from cinema’s racist past. Instead, the racially-charged film that was controversial in the 1970s was the affectively intense satire of Song of the South: Bakshi’s Coonskin. In addition to satirizing Disney, Bakshi’s deliberately shocking representation of life in the inner-city was also a product of, and a subversive response to, Hollywood’s controversial “Blaxploitation” period. This consisted of the numerous studio films, released mostly between 1969 and 1974, that “featured black casts playing out various action-adventures in the ghetto.” Often motivated more by financial concerns than newfound social awareness, these films emerged in large measure from Hollywood’s growing desire to exploit profitable African-American distribution markets. Films like Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972) offered new cinematic visions of strong, assertive anti-Sidney Poitiers—black stars who celebrated their race rather than minimized it.

Although admirable to the extent that it offered more roles to African-American actors and touched superficially on the concerns of urban life, Blaxploitation also depended upon degrading narratives of murder, drug trafficking and prostitution. Thus, as Ed Guerrero has noted, Blaxploitation also had a contradictory appeal, since it reflected and perpetuated racist white assumptions about the general violence and criminality of black life in the inner-city. Bakshi’s film directly negotiated this contradiction.

Song of the South’s reception history is incomplete without looking at Coonskin. As one of the last Blaxploitation films of the period, Coonskin told the story of Brother Rabbit’s journey from the American South to Harlem to take on an Italian gangster who was ruining the neighborhood. As Michael Gillespie argued, “Coonskin can be thought of as closer to the irrational and transgressive spirit of [the oral slave narrative] Brer Rabbit than has ever been previously imagined.” The film restored Brother Rabbit as a signifier of the black experience (in keeping with its origins), highlighted the grotesqueness of blaxploitation as a genre, and critiqued the ignorant whiteness and sentimental nostalgia of Song of the South.

Although the latter was constructed as a critique of the former, both Song of the South and Coonskin shared quite a bit in common. Both responded to Disney’s legacy and its impact on animation (Song of the South as its affirmation, Coonskin as its rejection). Both reflected childhood memories—the audiences’ own nostalgia with Song of the South and Disney more generally; Bakshi for his own childhood living in a predominately Black neighborhood of Brooklyn and watching Disney cartoons. Both responded to the emergent popularity of Blaxploitation and reflected white visions of the African-American experience. Both worked within, and further perpetuated, cinematic stereotypes of that same experience.

Finally, both Song of the South and Coonskin were criticized upon first release for some of the same reasons. In the mid-1970s, the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and other activist groups protested Bakshi’s film, ironically citing very similar criticisms that marred Song of the South three decades earlier. In both cases, detractors saw the film as an offensive white interpretation of African-Americans which traded on grotesque and anachronistic (cinematic) stereotypes of the race. While Coonskin’s cultural and aesthetic satire of Song of the South was valid, its X-rated approach and knowing deployment of racist imagery was not necessarily unproblematic. As a result of this controversy, Paramount dropped the film in late 1974; it was eventually picked up by Bryanston Pictures and distributed as an “exploitation” picture.

Despite an intense amount of media coverage regarding its controversies, Coonskin quickly faded from theatres and public consciousness within a year. Its affective power and grotesque images left those few audiences who finally did get a chance, out of sometimes morbid curiosity, to see the film, feeling generally confused and alienated. Thus, one survived, and one didn’t.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Song of the South’s popularity was often dependent upon the same cultural appeal as Blaxploitation, the two traditions Coonskin brought together. Disney’s nostalgic vision of the American South spoke to the “large, conservative white audience’s [. . .] desire to, at least on screen, suppress the black revolt in all its manifestations and the white liberal-left social and cultural agenda built during the 1960s.” It was this audience that Guerrero identifies as making white reactionary vigilante fantasies like Dirty Harry (1972), Death Wish (1974) and Walking Tall (1974) popular—those films which often featured white cops cleaning up the same criminal urban spaces that Blaxploitation glorified.

Coonskin merged two otherwise incongruent subgenres (Disney animation and blaxploitation) into one deliberately grotesque and incoherent text to show how both rested on racist, and thoroughly cinematic, stereotypes about African-American identity in the 20th-Century. While made for a different time, the reception of Song of the South was no less a response to factors underlining Blaxploitation as Dirty Harry was in 1972. Coonskin’s appearance highlighted the superficially incoherent, but internally logical, cultural sense in which the early 1970s marked the sudden popularity of both Blaxploitation and Song of the South.

Though hardly embraced by the militant wing of the Civil Rights movement, Coonskin’s aggressive, unapologetic style echoed the racial rebellion of the period, while Disney’s nostalgic vision of pastoral simplicity and institutional racism appealed to audiences rediscovering open spaces via the American suburb. Thus, Song of the South’s successful reissue in the 1970s was a cinematic equivalent to the “white flight” which deeply affected American cities. As Guerrero notes, “After years of urban riots and rebellions, shifting demographics accelerated as racial boundaries eroded, and most American cities found whites heading for the suburbs, abandoning city centers and their movie houses to inner-city blacks.”

Both versions of the Uncle Remus tales appeared within the context of Blaxploitation and urban rebellion in the inner-cities, the latter of which was provoked by years of racial tension and existing power structures sympathetic to white privilege. This coexisted with the large scale migration of both white people and civic resources to the suburbs that originally began with the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s. Likewise, Song of the South provided comfort, in the form of outdated stereotypes, to white people who were unsettled by the sudden power, authority and autonomy blacks had struggled to attain in urban centers such as Harlem, Detroit, Los Angeles and the south side of Chicago. These were power centers that fifty years earlier (such as in the Greenwood district of Tulsa) would have been wiped out in a white-instigated race riot.

Yet Coonskin’s understanding of cultural politics and racial representations isn’t simple. Like all Blaxploitation texts, Bahski’s visually and aurally challenging X-rated film can be also read as a liberatory white fantasy of how hopelessly violent and chaotic US urban spaces had become in the aftermath of mass migration to the suburbs. Although the film itself did not appeal to those audiences, controversy around its aesthetic provocation symbolically reaffirmed for white audiences the need to leave the city, reasserting racial order and boundaries. Symbolizing the lack of direction within the Civil Rights movement, liberals and activists argued amongst themselves over the value of Coonskin.

Coonskin’s satirical logic may have shrewdly highlighted how the presence of Song of the South in the 1970s spoke, at least in part, to racist attitudes about American urban spaces. However, the same can be said for Bakshi’s film—Coonskin was made by a white Brooklyn native who had since moved to a trendy and wealthy section of Southern California at the start of his successful filmmaking career. While detractors such as CORE missed or ignored Coonskin’s attempt at satire, the larger concern about the use of racist stereotypes was not without merit.

Reactions to Coonskin’s controversial reception represent one of the earliest shifts in the increasingly revived perception of Song of the South itself. The confrontational presence of Bakshi’s film during 1974 and 1975, its provocative textuality and critical backlash, was eventually appropriated by proponents of Song of the South to deflect attention from, and even validate, the latter.

In nostalgic contrast to Disney’s old film, Coonskin became for fans an example of a truly “offensive” representation when it came to images of African-Americans in film. They contrasted the negative media attention and the verbal and visual intensity of Coonskin’s satire with the popular and politically uneventful appearance of Song of the South a couple years earlier to imply that Disney’s film was harmless, even morally positive, entertainment. Although Coonskin had been intended as a biting indictment of Disney animation, Song of the South and conservative audiences which embraced both, its reception took a much different shape in the long-run.

Writing in the guise of “Thumper” from Bambi (1942), Arthur Cooper addressed a 1975 review of Coonskin to a now-deceased Walt Disney in Newsweek. As with several reviews of the time, he criticized Bakshi’s film as narratively uneven and unfunny. More interesting was how Cooper also deflected attention back favorably to Song of the South. Bakshi, he wrote, has “made Coonskin. It’s got an R rating, which must stand for Ripoff because what he’s done is turn [Disney’s] Uncle Remus stories inside out.” Instead of analyzing Coonskin further, Cooper nostalgically evoked memories of what he saw as Disney’s more innocent version:

Last night I watched an old print of your “Song of the South,” with all those cute bluebirds and sharecroppers, and I think I’ll send it to Bakshi. Although there were protests about [Song of the South in the past], in this case CORE ought to just let sleeping dogs snore.

Cooper’s nostalgic lament highlighted how Coonskin had received harsher criticism in the 1970s than Song of the South had. It also foreshadowed how the negative reception of Bakshi’s film was later appropriated to even more conservative ends by supporters of Disney. Cooper’s review offered an early glimpse into how the intensity around Coonskin made the seeming simplicity of Song of the South more appealing to sympathetic critics and fans. In the long run, Coonskin’s reception unintentionally worked in support of the very same film it sought to criticize.

Similarly, film critic and historian Leonard Maltin highlighted the Coonskin controversy in an entry on Song of the South in the second edition of his widely-read book, The Disney Films (1984). Unapologetically reverent, his compilation offered detailed information on the production histories, plot summaries and critical receptions of every major Disney film ever made. For the second edition, Maltin added two sentences on Coonskin to his section on Song of the South:

There are still occasional protests [to Song of the South], though the worst of these seems mild compared to the reception given Ralph Bakshi’s live-action/animated Coonskin in 1975—a protest so fiery that the film was disowned by its distributor! Ironically, Coonskin was a modern-day satire based in part on Song of the South.

Maltin did not explain why Coonskin was “so fiery,” or how it was “a modern-day satire” of Song of the South. His reference to Bakshi’s film did little more than deflecting attention away from Song of the South’s past controversies. Disney’s conservative film on the surface is a mild, less overtly offensive, text than Coonskin’s abrasive satire. Yet what gets lost here is that Bakshi’s film was not meant for a child-friendly audience. In fact, Coonskin was meant to provoke.

The intersection of Coonskin, Disney and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement becomes increasingly entangled here. The effect is that these complicated histories become increasingly distorted through historical revisionism. Maltin’s second edition perpetuated and even solidified several myths about Song of the South—one being that it was always a huge box-office hit in its earlier releases. Another was that criticism of the film was muted overall in 1946, save for “some liberal reviewers and Negro organizations.” Maltin also suggested that:

It was only in the 1960s, when Civil Rights became a major concern of the entire United States, that it became clear that Song of the South and films of that kind would be touching sensitive spots if shown again. Even the reissue of Gone with the Wind in 1967 sparked some (relatively minor) protest among certain Negro groups who objected . . . .

However, this is the exact opposite of what happened—the film was most forcefully protested in the 1940s. Yet, in Maltin’s reconstructed timeline, Song of the South’s brief controversy in the “Civil Rights” era of 1960s had been successfully overcome and put to rest. In the 1984 edition, Maltin even reworded one sentence to seem less interested in the conceding the “Uncle Tom” criticism of Song of the South. In 1973, Maltin wrote, “it is difficult to condemn a film of this kind, Uncle Tom accusations notwithstanding, for in spite of its syrupy story line and occasional flaws, Song of the South has some of the most delightful moments ever captured on film.”

In 1984, however, Maltin rewrote this sentence to read, “Accusations of Uncle Tomisms and quibbles over its syrupy storyline are ultimately defeated by the film’s sheer entertainment value.” The difference is perhaps incidental, though no less noteworthy, given that most of the other pages on Song of the South are otherwise identical. Whereas the first edition appears to bracket off the consideration of “Uncle Tom accusations,” suggesting the concerns may have validity, the second edition collapses those criticisms with the other reservations about the film, hence creating the impression that every criticism of Song of the South was overcome by virtue of its affective entertainment. In the context of his second edition, Maltin positioned Song of the South as a happy corrective, as reassurance, to the perceived trauma caused by the controversies around Coonskin.

Just as white opposition increased steadily in the late 1960s and 1970s to the Civil Rights movement, there was another backlash against the backlash to Coonskin. As Maltin and Cooper’s reactions demonstrated, the backlash was not in defense of Coonskin. Rather the controversies around the film were used to deflect the question of racial difference altogether. In the void of liberal disagreements over Bakshi’s film grew an unchallenged conservatism. The criticism of Coonskin was used to implicitly discredit the larger Civil Rights movement for greater equality in cinematic representation. In a review of Daniel Leab’s book, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (1975), Tom Shales commented in passing on the CORE controversy. He noted that “one would think constructive forms of consciousness-raising, if such are possible, would be preferable to coercive tactics such as” CORE’s call for censorship with Coonskin.

He pointed out that around the same time “pressure groups in New York [had] blocked the airing of a public television documentary because they thought it offensive.” For Shales, these were examples of how counter-productive the protests were. He went further, arguing that the notorious radio and later television program, Amos `N` Andy (which was eventually taken off the air because of African-American protests), was “funny” and that “several black celebrities have said they did not find it objectionable.” Shales’ review criticized Leab’s book—which rightly criticized the history of African-American representations in Hollywood—for “righteous indignation” and for demanding too much progress too soon. By “asking a 1949 film to succeed at a 1975 level [. . .],” he wrote, “Leab apparently expects films to reform overnight.” Yet Shales also worked to undermine that same progress in representation by arguing that protest groups (such as CORE) had gone too far. The contradictions of an evasive whiteness begin to reemerge in Shales’ piece—a type of identity which does not proclaim the importance of being white, but rather denies the category of “race” altogether (in the service of white privilege).

Once devised as a particular kind of critique of Song of the South, Coonskin’s failure and de facto censorship became appropriated by Disney supporters as a vindication of the 1946 film’s innocence and entertainment value, and as a deflection from the controversies the earlier movie had incited. In the 1984 edition of The Disney Films, Maltin declared that “Song of the South has triumphed, and survived a period of acute racial sensitivity.”

As framed, “a period of acute racial sensitivity” conflated both the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s with the controversy around Coonskin in the 1970s. This conservative denial of race in the 1980s celebrated a triumphal environment in which many whites became less racially conscious, while Civil Rights groups and media critics failed to mount a coherent critique of films such as Song of the South and Coonskin like they had in the 1940s. That progressive failure served those who wished for Song of the South’s survival during “a period of acute racial sensitivity”—a confident assertion particularly appropriate to the anti-Civil Rights movement of the decade.

Subsequently, Song of the South’s racist depiction of the Plantation South, generally agreed upon since the 1940s, became increasingly rejected by fans of the film and supporters of Disney by the 1980s. Sympathizers were emboldened by the controversy around Bakshi’s film, by an increasingly conservative political climate, and by the continuing survival of the 1946 film. Although inaccurate to trace all of this back to the release of Coonskin, negative reactions to that film that also touched on Song of the South almost always invariably reinforced this twisted logic.

The reactions to both films in the 1970s served as sobering touchstones in relation to white America’s decreasingly racial consciousness. When Song of the South reappeared in the 1980s within this new condition of possibility, the film seemed tame, even harmless for many. The film was now as a nostalgic journey from a beloved institution’s past (Disney). Audiences during the emergent “color-blind” 1980s were suddenly quite anxious not to see race, or allow others to see race, in the Disney film. In retrospect, attacks on Coonskin were at least partially misplaced. As Bakshi’s film faded, Song of the South would continue to be far more resilient and insidious—the same sort of evasive whiteness that Coonskin had tried to deconstruct.