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A meme shared more than 9,500 times on Facebook claims that Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse was a creation based on a character called ‘Jigaboo’, made to make fun of black people. This is false: the image presented as evidence of the claim is actually an artwork created in 1994, long after Mickey Mouse first appeared in 1928. The post from February 4 compares the image of a derogatory Sambo-like character dressed in Mickey Mouse clothing with another showing the popular Disney cartoon mouse, and is captioned: RACISM..Mickey mouse was a remake of a character named jigaboo who was made to mock black people..And I use to like Mickey Mouse smh (shaking my head). A screenshot taken on March 5, 2019 of the misleading Facebook post The post elicited a string of comments referencing widespread allegations that Disney, who died in 1966, was a racist and anti-Semite. A screenshot taken on March 5, 2019 of comments on the misleading Facebook post But a reverse image search of the caricature used in the Facebook post leads to a 1994 painting by African-American artist Michael Ray Charles titled (Forever Free). Charles’ work unpacks racial stereotypes drawn from American history and the advertising industry, as shown in his other artworks , which could explain the likeness to Mickey Mouse. In (Forever Free), Charles appears to draw from children’s book Little Black Sambo and its lead character Sambo. Sambo is used as an offensive reference to black people and jigaboo is also an old racial slur once used to refer to African-Americans. The word resurfaced in 2015 when Fox 8 news anchor Kristi Capel had to apologise for using the word to describe a performance by the pop star Lady Gaga. @John_Ferguson_ @fox8news I apologize if I offended you, I had no idea it was a word or what it meant. Thank you for watching. — Kristi Capel (@Kristi_Capel) February 23, 2015 A blog entry on the Walt Disney Family Museum website says that in 1948, Walt Disney wrote an essay in which he described how the famous mouse came to be: He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when the business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb, and disaster seemed right around the corner, wrote Disney. His daughter and founder of the museum, Diane Disney Miller, is also quoted in the blog post: It was on that long train ride that dad conceived of a new cartoon subject, a mouse who was then refined and further developed by Ub Iwerks, and given his name by my mother. While it’s wrong to say that Mickey was inspired by a racist character called Jigaboo, numerous film historians have suggested that Mickey Mouse and other early American cartoon characters were influenced by 19th century minstrel performers. The minstrels, who painted their faces black and lips red in mockery of people of African descent, wore white gloves, like Mickey. Film-lovers have long debated whether or not Walt Disney was racist or anti-Semitic. Critics have long argued that some of his company’s early cartoons perpetuated racist stereotypes, including Song of the South, a 1946 film considered so controversial that Disney has never released it for home purchase in the US. Other critics have complained that the 1933 film Three Little Pigs perpetuated anti-Semitic stereotypes.
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