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11 of The Most Racist Movies Ever Made

Posted byBy ABS Contributor | Published on: | Updated on November 25, 2013 CommentsComments (212)

Fantasia (1940)

This entire list could have been dedicated to Disney projects, but “Fantasia” is one of the most blatant violations committed by animation filmmaker. Even in Fantasia’s beautiful, magical landscape, the black centaurs are hoof-polishing handmaidens for prettier, superior Aryan centaurs. Disney tried very hard to erase this from movie-goers’ memories by releasing later versions—minus the pickaninny centaur slaves.

Roger Ebert rated the film four stars out of four, and noted that throughout Fantasia, “Disney pushes the edges of the envelope”.

Soul Man (1986)

The comedy “Soul Man” was a misguided attempt to expose the ridiculousness of racism using humor – and the blackface wasn’t the reason. Although “Soul Man” did accomplish some of its objectives, the film also reinforced a number of the stereotypes that it sought to disparage. Having a shoe polish-coated character beat out the African-American applicants for an academic-based Harvard scholarship targeted to them, was a grave miscalculation.

In 2008, New York Press‘s contrarian critic Armond White would cite the movie as predicting the rise of Barack Obama, who entered the real-life Harvard Law School in 1988, and White declared that Soul Man was “easily the best movie ever set at Harvard.”

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