A project conducted at a California college recently suggested that a popular animated Christian show was extremely racist and stigmatized against nonwhite people.
“VeggieTales” is a Christian children’s cartoon that’s been airing since 1993, but a group of Cal State San Marcos students declared the show a “danger to children” by saying that it perpetuates stereotypes, the College Fix reported.
Cal State San Marcos’ “Annual Whiteness Forum” is a project from professor Dreama Moon’s “The Communication of Whiteness” class, that urges students to take a “critical look at whiteness” according to organizers. In past forum, students have argued that the NFL is racist due to most of the players being Black and the coaches and team owners are white. They’ve also said white women advanced white supremacy after the majority voted for President Trump to take office.
Their most recent “critical look” was aimed at “VeggieTales” on Thursday at the forum on Thursday. The group of students pointed out that the villains in the cartoon were noticeably darker than the rest of the characters.
A female student claimed that the creators of the cartoon were making the vegetable villains racial minorities by giving them non-white accents compared to the good characters.
Eric Metaxas, a former writer for “VeggieTales” told PJ Media, “All vegetables are part of one race, even though they are of many colors.”
(photo credit: the College Fix)
The student’s project was titled “Children in the Church” and read, “When supremacists aim to taint the way children think of people of color, it will work.” She not only labeled “VeggieTales” as a “danger” to kids, but also believed it corrupted the way children see non-whites compared to whites at an early age.
“Whiteness in the Bible isn’t just seen as ‘power’ it’s seen as ‘good.’ When kids see the good white character triumph over the bad person of color character they are taught that white is right and minorities are the source of evil,” the project reads.
Over the course of years, experts have found that villains are often depicted with minority dialects. Michael Downing, An associate professor of English at Tufts University noted that Scar from “The Lion King” spoke with a British accent while his underlings, the hyenas, spoke in seemingly African-American and Latino accents.
