The Confederacy Lives On at Splash Mountain

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’… Say it loud, I’m Black, and I’m Proud!

Disney, and no I don’t need to attach “Walt,” “land” or “world” to it because Disney is one of those entities which doesn’t require any clarification. Why? It’s yet another 20th-century creation that has “shaken up the world.” “American Exceptionalism” epitomized. Right there with GE, IBM, Standard Oil, and Ford…. The “iconic” company, the quintessential blueprint of capital “C” “Capitalism,” has long last succumbed to common economic sense and basic human decency, and is, finally, erasing all traces of the extremely popular theme park ride, “Splash Mountain” and the detached-from-reality, 1940s movie it is based on, “Song of the South.”

As I pen this small piece of my little mind, people, reacting to the official closing of the ride last week on January 22, are selling Splash Mountain bottled water they allegedly gathered from the ride before it was shut down. $150.00 a bottle. You bet millions are sad because they loved the ride in an innocent and ignorant manner – we did, my family did, I’ve ridden the ride say 75 times over the last 30 years we’ve gone as a Black family. I took it as an opportunity for a learning moment and broke down the background on every vacation.

Please note, I’ve been enlightened all my life. I understand complex issues, I can separate and decipher the utter truth.

Now millions of others will shed crimson and gray tears because they look at the closing of the ride in the same light one looks at the closing and rebranding of a Robert E. Lee State Park. They’ll blame it on “Uppity” Negroes at work again.

Ah, isn’t it beautiful? “Black Power” in action!

Splash Mountain, which debuted in 1989 in Disneyland and 1992 in Disney World, featured characters from the 1946 movie “Song of the South.” The ride and, to a lesser extent, the surrounding “Land of Dixie,” in essence, promoted the stereotypical glamorization of the American South post-civil war/“War of Northern Aggression” and sabotaged Reconstruction years as a place where “happiness” and contentment rule the land.

Instead of praising the post-civil war Confederacy’s version of life for newly freed Black slaves trapped in the “Land of Cotton,” Splash Mountain and New Orleans Square will get a significant overhaul and will be rebranded as Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, based on the 2009 movie Princess and the Frog. It’s scheduled to open in late 2024.

If you’re paying any attention, at all, you realize “Splash Mountain” is but another cultural battlefield in America’s centuries-old “cold” race/civil war. If you’re not hip to “Splash Mountain” and its symbolic standing, you need to read more, diversify your reading and “read between the lines,” to decipher all the little White lies.

At the time, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the iconic congressman from Harlem, decried the film as an “insult to American minorities [and] everything that America as a whole stands for,” while a journalist at The Afro-American slammed the movie as “a piece of propaganda for white supremacy as Hollywood ever produced: their point – the movie ignored, marginalized, sanitized and trivialized the barbarities and atrocities of American slavery.

Walter White, the former executive secretary of the NAACP, said the film “helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery.”

Of course, White America disingenuously disagreed, and couldn’t care less; it fit their collective detached-from-reality narrative of events.

Additionally, at the time of the making and release of the Song of the South, it is said the Disney brain trust realized how very simple and yet complicated the combustible issue was: “The negro situation is a dangerous one. Between the negro haters and the negro lovers, there are many chances to run afoul of situations that could run the gamut all the way from the nasty to the controversial.”

This is still the situation corporate America finds itself in, no? Trying to appease the polar opposite love/hate Black people perspectives their WASP customers maintain. Because now, low and behold, White America is still split among Negro haters and Negro Lovers, I’d argue it’s not a 50/50 split, but rather more like 65% haters, 15% tolerators, and about 10% lovers. There’s not a lot of “love” held for Black folks in this hostile land.

The reaction, over-reaction to this evolutionary move to recreate the ride is going to be unbelievable. The day this ride opens, Trump’s troops are going to commence the attacks. The Conservative-minded Caucasian folks are going to equate this to another example of “Woke-ism” run amok.

Disney has also transformed the animated red-haired Mermaid princess Ariel into a real-life Black girl for the movie, and of course, this ignites a blue flame under the red behinds of Trump’s klan – of course, all animated mermaids must be White…. Disney’s efforts to diversify and craft a more inclusive imaginary world are ridiculously regarded as a prime example of “The Replacement Theory” at work.

Hell, we got White folks complaining about Black Gnomes and Black elves moving in on their exclusive make-believe front lawn territory. If mainstream White America had its druthers, we’d all be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day while they outlaw MLK Day and Black History Month.

And may I note: Grand Pooh-Pah DeSantis will attack the upcoming Black History Month in order to appease and please his supporters, because his supporters, the 75 million strong GOP “base” is inherently racist, elitist and sexist – xenophobic – in every aspect of the word.

Lord DeSantis is simply giving the people, White people, what they want – Apartheid and eternal minority rule.

Unquestionably, there will be White folks who’ll boycott the ride, if not the park. It’s why DeSantis’s anti-Disney positions are playing so well below the Mason-Dixon Line, down in the Land of Dixie. The Rednecks, hillbillies, and good old boys n’ gals view themselves as fighting for their country and way of life. They are taking back their country and making it, alas, keeping it, as 1946 White as possible.

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’… Say it loud, I’m Black, and I’m Proud!