Mickey Mouse is a black man, or rather he is a white man
dressed up as a black man anthropomorphized as a mouse. He is a minstrel
figure. Just take a look at Al Jolson:
Now take a look at Mickey:
As Susan Willis has written, ‘I doubt any of today’s
generation of cartoon consumers sees Mickey Mouse as a derivative of
African-American culture . . . Nevertheless the black body that debuted in “Steamboat
Willie” dancing a jig and singing and whistling to “Turkey in the Straw” makes
direct reference to minstrelsy’.
Goofy is a
hillbilly. Originally conceived as Dippy Dawg, he has a southern drawl, wears
crumpled clothing and is clumsy and slow. His primary creator, Art Babbit, viewed
him as ‘a half-wit’, ‘shiftless’ and a ‘hick’.
From a popular music perspective, what is interesting about
these two characters is that they run parallel to the stereotyping of musical genres
in the United States. Mickey Mouse was first introduced in 1928. Three years prior
to this, Ralph Peer of the Okeh record company had coined the term ‘Race records’
to categorize the music of the black artists that he was recording for the
label. The term was swiftly utilised by other record labels and was adopted by Billboard for their charts of black
music until their tactical switch to ‘rhythm and blues’ in 1949.
Goofy was introduced in 1932. He
was reflective of a growing cult for hillbilly music. The term had been adopted
for what is now called country music in 1925. Allan Sutton has argued that
southern performers consciously fabricated their image as hillbillies, aiming
to appeal to northern record buyers who were ‘not ready to give up [their]
image of country musicians as isolated backwoods bumpkins’.
Rex Cole’s Mountaineers (pictured below) were one of the first acts to exploit
the stereotype.
The categorisation of ‘race’ and ‘hillbilly’ music enabled each
of these genres to be targeted at its most profitable audience, but it also
meant that they became divided from one another. They had shared common
influences and had evidenced greater diversity before becoming codified. William
Howard Kenney has written:
The industry rigidly distinguished
between rural white and rural Black recorded music by creating and maintaining
segregated recording and marketing categories. In the process, much of the
richness and variety of cross-cultural assimilations disappeared from the
records as musicians worked, seemingly without undue effort, to fit their music
to their employers’ categories.
Mickey Mouse and Goofy are perhaps less segregated, however.
When it comes to Mickey Mouse, it should not be forgotten that the key to
minstrelsy was its duality. It was a white person inside the black mask. Although the
form is guilty of gross racial stereotypes, it is demonstrative of identification
as well as mimicry. To use Eric Lott’s terms, there is love as well as theft.
Goofy is also
more complex than first appears. On the one hand, he is a minstrel too. He
shares Mickey’s white-blackness and he dons the white gloves. On the other hand, he
is a black hillbilly. Babbit designed
him as a ‘good-natured colored boy’. While it would be going too far to say that
he is a prototype Ray Charles - a black performer who evidences a fondness for
white southern culture - he is at least indicative of the cross-cultural currents
of the south.
Finally, I’m
struggling to work out what it means that several white, R&B-inspired pop
stars, including Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake,
began their careers as mouseketeers in the Mickey
Mouse Club.
