stoprobbers:

Unless you are poor, brown, female, Jewish, or gay.

I’m not gonna tag this Disney cuz that’s rude, but I’m not into the Walt Disney worship I see here on Tumblr, or in real life. The man was a racist and sexist bigot who designed Disney Land as a tribute to a pastoral version of America that never existed. He placed it in Anaheim, where minorities who were too poor and marginalized in Southern California to, by and large, afford cars could not get to it, and instructed admissions employees to discourage them from coming. He refused to hire black or brown people except one woman who was forced to perform in near-minstrel capacity as Aunt Jemima in the Aunt Jemima Pancake House on Orleans Street. He also was a public supporter of some of the most vile anti-Semites in America.

You can talk about modern Disney and all the progress its made from these frankly nauseating beginnings, but holding Walt Disney up as some champion of individuality, self-expression, and self-esteem is a damn lie. He only wanted you to be yourself if you were white and middle class. 

This reminds me… many people don’t know about the Disney city: Celebration, Florida.  It’s a town created in Walt Disney’s ideallic vision of America.  And wouldn’t you know it, it’s really racist… and the population almost all white rich people. (93.57%, according to the Wiki page.)

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/13/celebration-death-of-a-dream :

Walt Disney always had a dream to build a model town. It was part of his master plan to create a new magic kingdom in Florida. How he came to put the plan together is the stuff of Disney legend – the numerous trips he took in private jets disguised so that no one would spot him, the front companies he set up to buy the land also incognito, the 30,000 acres he acquired before anyone noticed.

Less well known is that it was all part of his messianic desire for total control. Disney managed to persuade the local authorities to grant him absolute power within the confines of his new empire, including the ability to raise taxes and run the roads and public amenities. In effect, he had created a private Disney government.

Rick Foglesong, a Disney watcher of long standing at Rollins College in Florida, calls it “the Vatican with mouse ears”. “Walt Disney was an authoritarian. Yes he was an artist, but he was also a control freak. People tend to see the Disney creativity, they often miss the centralised control that lies behind it.” Disney died in 1966, before his aspiration of creating his own community could be realised. But when Celebration finally came into being it bore many of his hallmarks.

At its core was nostalgia. While inner cities across America were in the grip of the crack cocaine epidemic, and middle-class Americans were fleeing to increasingly isolated and alienating suburbs, Celebration was conceived as a return to the glory days of America’s pre-war small towns. As the authors of Celebration, USA, have put it: “The heirs to Disney’s empire were designing the place where Walt had wished he’d grown up.”

The planners did a trawl of the most picturesque southern towns – Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans – and borrowed the best from them: town squares, verandahs, gables and front porches. Then they boiled all the ideas down into a pattern book that dictated every detail right down to the plants that could be grown in the yards. There were only six house styles permitted, and only a limited range of colours – white, blue, yellow, pink and buff, all in pastel shades. Though Disney sold most of its stake in Celebration to a property management company in 2004, the Disney spirit very much lives on.