Racial and Sexual Discrimination in Disney Movie "Zootopia"

Racial and Sexual Discrimination in Zootopia
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Racial and Sexual Discrimination in Zootopia
Modern society has made significant steps in establishing equality in all aspects, especially race and gender. Despite this progress, modern American society is far from alleviating racial and gender discrimination altogether. While the broadcast media has been on the frontline in addressing some of these issues, it has also contributed negatively to the unbalanced modern American society. In her article, Lippi-Green (2012) argues that the film industry plays a huge role in introducing children to discrimination and social categorization. Lippi’s primary concern is with Disney, which specializes in TV shows and films targeting children. She argues that Disney is insensitive to its content’s discriminatory effect on children. The rationale behind her argument is that children mainly rely on what they see, listen and observe to make sense of the world. Airing content that upholds discrimination is more likely to encourage negative social categorization among children. Zootopia is one of the prominent children’s films released by Disney. In this essay, the portrayal of characters in Zootopia is examined to establish the validity of Lippi’s claims.
In modern society, discrimination is propagated in how the dominant races or population influences the minor races to accept the former’s perceived reality. According to Lippi-Green (2012), “animated films offer a unique way in which the dominant culture reaffirms its control over subordinate cultures and nations by re-establishing, on a day-to-day basis, their preferred view of the world is right and proper and primary” (pg.111). This argument illustrates that Disney has a great advantage at creating an impression of reality among its primary consumers, children. Consequently, releasing content that creates a racist or sexist impression largely influences the young viewer to develop negative social categorization and perception of different population segments. This aspect is prevalent in the film Zootopia. In the film, the animals are classified into two main groups representing modern American society’s larger racial categories; Predator represents the races and preys representing the whites. In the scene where Juddy Hopps, a prey, bids her parents goodbye to leave for the city of Zootopia, her father gives her different tools to aid her in her new life, including fox spray and other things to keep off the predators, despite Zootopia being a civilized society. Also, in a previous scene, Juddy’s parent points out that the lash and aggressive behavior among the predators is in their DNA. These scenes demonstrate that despite modern society having achieved a state of harmony and equality, people of color are still perceived to be illogical and incapable of keeping up with mod...