American hedonism closes its eyes to death, and has been
incapable of exorcising the destructive power of the moment
with a wisdom like that of the Epicureans of antiquity.
- Octavio Paz
Death is un-American, and an affront to every citizen's inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
- Arnold Toynbee
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"As long as such self-serving hypocrisy
motivates America's response, Ukraine will
only sink further into needless bloodshed,
and that blood will be on America's head."
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In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards.
― Bertrand Russell
Global Coke
Global Coke
"What those 'racists' are reflexively and rightly reacting
to is the soulless chill as the fire goes out beneath the
melting pot. Those who think America can thrive as a
'cultural mosaic' are worse than fools; they're Canadians."
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Global Coke
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster,
in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe
have grown to appalling dimensions.
― Frantz Fanon
What the United States does best is understand itself.
What it does worst is understand others.
- Carlos Fuentes
Poor Mexico, so far from God
and so close to the United States.
- Porfirio Diaz
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"Indeed, everything about the American southland was magical
and exotic to the young Canadian musicians, from the sights
and smells to the drawling manner of speech to, especially, the
central role that music played in people’s everyday lives."
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America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
- Sigmund Freud
America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
- Auguste Bartholdi
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chimerica
"This is the tone of the China Century, a subtle
mix of Nazi/Soviet bravado and 'oriental'
cunning -- easily misunderstood, and never
heard before, in a real enemy, by the West."
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chimerica
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
"And for the others who argued for English-only
patriotism, I note that there are more than
57 million Americans (about 20% of the nation)
whose first-language is not English...."
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Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
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"This is the behavior, and the fate, of paranoid
old-world tyrants like Hitler or Saddam, not liberal new-world democracies like America pretends to be."
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America is the only nation in history which
miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to
degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
- Georges Clemenceau
I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
- Charles–Maurice Talleyrand
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.
- Edmund Burke
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
- Marshall McLuhan
"The removal of racist sports nicknames (and mascots) seems outrageously belated
-- why, exactly, has this civil rights cause
taken so long to gain momentum?"
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The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the
United States reactionaries use to scare people.
It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.
- Mao Tse-tung
They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but
they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.
- Red Cloud
In America sex is an obsession,
in other parts of the world it is a fact.
- Marlene Dietrich
I would rather have a nod from an American,
than a snuff-box from an emperor.
- Lord Byron
One day the United States discovered it was an empire.
But it didn’t know what an empire was.
It thought that an empire was merely the biggest of all corporations.
- Roberto Calasso
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather
be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
- Alexis de Tocqueville
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"No one, I thought, could watch those scenes, of young children slaughtered en masse, and so many parents grieving, without thinking that this, finally, would tip some kind of balance in the country."
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If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams
then you must still regard America today with the same naive
enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.
- Jean Baudrillard
I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
- Samuel Johnson
America, thou half brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land.
- Philip Bailey
"What can be more powerful than disinformation in the Information Age?"
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England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
- Sir Walter Besant
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by
posterity because he was the last to discover America.
- James Joyce
Now, from America, empty indifferent things
are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
If the United States is to recover fortitude and lucidity,
it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must
recover the "others"- the outcasts of the Western world.
- Octavio Paz
The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
It has been going on now for three hundred years.
- Oscar Wilde
"America really is, for most Americans, all things considered, a good place to be, and all they really want is for everyone to enjoy the same privilege and pleasure."
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When good Americans die they go to Paris;
when bad Americans die they go to America.
- Oscar Wilde
jobs drug dealer
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They're nothing more than traffickers; and as the smart traffickers'll tell you, you don't use the merchandise. They are just inoculating their kids with a tech-drug serum, to immunize them against the very merchandise that put the **** bowling alley in their basement.
jobs drug dealer
America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that
lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.
- Georg Friedrich Hegel
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.
Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
- Arnold Toynbee
Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
- Winston Churchill
The thing that impresses me most about Americans
is the way parents obey their children.
- Edward, Duke of Windsor
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering
what average opinion believes average opinion to be.
- John Maynard Keynes
Europe was created by history.
America was created by philosophy.
- Margaret Thatcher
America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming!... The real American has not yet arrived.
He is only in the crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races.
- Israel Zangwill
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those
who have seen America only in their dreams.
- Pico Iyer
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
- Ringo Starr
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.
― D.H. Lawrence
I have two conflicting visions of America.
One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.
― Bono
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror
of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis,
the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
― Roberto Bolaño

April 14, 2024

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Author Topic: American Race Relations in Zootopia


canadiansc-
holar2015
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Posts: 8
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American Race Relations in Zootopia
on: April 7, 2016, 23:38

Zootopia came out in theaters on March 4th here in Canada and I rushed to get a seat. A movie about cartoon animals doesn't sound too new or exciting, but everyone was discussing how Zootopia was actually about racism. I had to see this for myself.

The movie was about two groups in the animal kingdom (predator and prey) who decide to live together in harmony in the city known as Zootopia.

What struck me the most about the movie was Nick, the fox who tried to join the Boy Scouts when he was younger but got muzzled by the prey as they told him a predator could never join their groups. Nick instead turns to a devious life of crime and fraud.

To me, Nick represents minorities that are often labelled as criminals or thugs and never given any opportunities to move beyond these labels so they are instead subjected to a life in and out of the legal system. At one point, Nick even gets referred to as "articulate," which comes off as a backhanded compliment.

One of the plot twists of the movie is that the predators turn "savage" and after that the social order of Zootopia is in disarray. There's a scene on the subway where a bunny brings her kids closer to her once a tiger sits down near them.

The problem, I found, with Zootopia is that both the predator and the prey seem to face systemic racism, which is not the case when looking at this through a black and white lens.The message also seems to be muddled because it is biologically correct to assume that the predators would attack the prey in the animal kingdom.

Zootopia seemed to take a swing at discussing race relations in America, and missed. Some parts were great, but I would have rather watched it without knowing the subtext.



Wolf77
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Re: American Race Relations in Zootopia
on: March 9, 2017, 15:30

*sighs* Why can't people just enjoy watching an animated movie without searching for negativity in it?
The only subtext any artwork has is the one people assign to it.

At the beginning of Zootopia it is clearly explained that predators have overcome their instincts to hurt prey.
Towards the end of the movie, the one behind the master plan (a tiny sheep and the mayor’s secretary) to target predators to make them feared by herbivorous animals clearly explains that predators were used as scapegoats. It was all done to serve her agenda.

Aggression can be heightened in anyone by the use of drugs.
That is also shown in Zootopia when Judy discovers that a herbivore can "go savage" as well (in the scene she has a realization that "nighthowlers" are plants and not wolves).

Predators could easily refer to people with a predisposition to be more aggressive.

Also drawing direct comparisons can be dangerous. Judy herself attempts to explain the outbreak of "savagery" among predators and falls back on a stereotype (in the context of Zootopia) that predators are bound to harm prey.
Nick then confronts her and logically feels betrayed.

Thankfully it is obsolete by now, but at the time of its usage phrenology was considered an actual science that could tell a person's character by the shape of their skull or face.

I am not trying to diminish your opinion in any way. What I am trying to do is to point out that any such message that one gathers from an artwork is relative and by no means definite.

Maybe you can try to watch Zootopia again in broader way.
It's easy to focus on one aspect, but that mustn’t diminish the whole.



M.J.
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Re: American Race Relations in Zootopia
on: May 20, 2017, 10:16

I hadn't seen Zootopia before because the name sounded so boring to my ear. However now I watched it just because I read canadianscholar2015's post that it's about racism. I really hadn't heard that before so I became really interested about the movie.

At first I tried to follow the movie about this racism point of view. It was still very difficult since from the very start the stereotypes were mixed in my opinion. Or how would you think? Who are the predators and who the preys? A little bunny who wanted to be a police is closer the theme "American dream" than racism. Later on the movie get to the themes of preconceptions and individuals.

Because I'm not from United States of the America I can't tell how people there think about these issues. But many times
it is said that U.S.A. is a melting pot of different nationalities. But is it? Do Americans have preconceptions or are you really living without them? Of course there is also the difference between the countryside and city how people think about these things.

One thing I'm sure. That Zootopia's message is fantastic. There is a lot of different stereotypes which are all proved wrong later. The key message is to get to know the people before you assume anything of them. And you can be anything you want.


pijademsar
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Re: American Race Relations in Zootopia
on: May 30, 2017, 17:59

I have not seen the movie either but I'm definitely planning to but from what I do know about it, I certainly see some parallels with racism.
Again I'm not from the US so I'm probably not the best person to discuss how accurate it is but I have seen a video on youtube that discusses the similarities between the events in the movie regarding those flowers that essentially function as drugs and the whole situation with crack cocaine in 1980s. As far as I know it's just a conspiracy theory as far as the intentional spreading of cocaine among African Americans goes but there are many parallels with the movie so even if it wasn't executed in the best way, I'm pretty sure it is about racism.
Another interesting fact is that the percentage of predators in Zootopia is said to be almost the same as the percentage of African American population in the US.
Here is the full video in case you are interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nMmC3YvR6M
At the end of the day it is just a theory but I think it makes some excellent points.

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