Bring Back Old Disney Channel
By Alexandria Millet, Culture Staff Writer
As an almost 21-year-old college junior, last weekend I unashamedly watched all three “Cheetah Girls” movies–a staple of my childhood. As I watched and sang along, conscious of my volume so my neighbor would not hear me, I marveled at the diversity of the cast that filled the screen.
My sisters and I grew up on the Disney Channel. Every day during our childhood you could find the television turned to channel 58 watching a rerun or a new episode. As a kid, never did I realize the extent of the exposure I got to different cultures through Disney.
This is something that is less common today, and should be once again valued in children’s programming; lessons that teach us to appreciate diversity and inclusion. So, I agree with the tweets you see on many twitter timelines: Bring back old Disney.
Raven-Symoné was one of four cheetah girls, but she got her start on the channel with her sitcom “That’s So Raven,” a show that followed the life of a physic teenager. Maybe not the most realist plot, but it definitely handled some real situations.
In the show’s black history episode, it goes into a storyline of why Raven, black, did not get a job at a clothing store that she was well qualified for, and her best friend Chelsea, white, did. It all comes to a head when the store manager says, “I don’t hire black people.”
Through a wacky scheme with costumes and video cameras, they expose the manager on a local news channel and get her fired. Yes, this explicit racism was acknowledged and combatted on Disney Channel in 2005.
Preteens were watching this show in their living rooms and had to consider race and racism, probably for the first time. The episode challenged the idea that racism was a thing of the past, easily something these preteens were taught in their classrooms.
Discrimination is real, and it does nothing for youth to teach them it does not exist through the absence of it on the television shows that they watch. This episode of “That’s So Raven” taught kids in a thirty-minute span that racism is alive, anti-blackness is real and they can do something about it.
Disney did not just create a dialogue about discrimination on race, but also discrimination on religion. Particularly through a 2004 episode of “The Proud Family” where Penny Proud makes a friend with a Pakistani girl, Radika, and sees the discrimination her and her family experience. But she also sees the beauty in their culture.
Penny and Radika switch homes for a week to experience each other’s culture, and Penny happens to be there during Ramadan. Through the whole experience, they realize they are more alike than they are different. Both Penny and Radika have an overprotective dad, a caring mom and an expressive grandparent living with them.
This episode is in post-9/11 America where Islamophobia was at a new high. The show created a space for kids to be taught not just tolerance, but acceptance too.
“The Proud Family” covered many other important topics to expand its viewer’s knowledge of the culture. This included episodes on Kwanzaa, black history and interracial relationships. This is one of many reasons we should all be excited that “The Proud Family” is coming to Disney Plus this November. This generation deserves to know the genius of “The Proud Family” and its ability to introduce cultures and challenge the perspectives of its viewers.
The cream of the crop of Disney addressing issues of race, discrimination and hate is in the 2000 classic “The Color of Friendship.” The movie is based on the true story of a white South African girl, Mahree, coming to study abroad in America and feeling shocked when she arrives at an African American family’s home. The shock was mutual because the Dellums family expected to welcome a black South African student into their home.
This all happened at the height of the South African apartheid and protest all around the world, including in Washington D.C. where the Dellums lived and the father worked as a Senator. The movie unpacked Mahree’s racism through her developing relationship with this family.
The movie called out racial slurs, global racism and the whitewashing of history. The Dellums’s daughter, Piper, and Mahree create a close friendship eventually, but it was not at the expense of the truth and calling out racism.
The Disney Channel I grew up watching challenged me not just to be a better person, but also look at the world beyond myself. I am not convinced that children’s programming does that today. Children growing up today are naive to injustice because they are not exposed to it in their youth. This is not cute, it is a great shame. So Disney, and other programs like it, should throw it back to how it used to be–standing up for the marginalized.