So that a week ago I saw an article about a very popular 90s children’s cartoon being considered subtly racist. (I’ve decided to not include the name of the cartoon because when I was reading comments on Facebook it seems like a lot of opinions/stances were based off of whether people liked the cartoon or not as children and I want this to remain unbiased.)

The article stated that it was typical for the antagonists to have darker colors (please note that the skin tones for these characters were not normal skin tones, they were weird colors like green, red, or orange.) and also that some antagonists also had accents such as Hispanic or French.

A while ago I posted about the little mermaid being considered offensive because Ariel couldn’t give consent to kiss Prince Eric when she didn’t have a voice. A lot of the comments stated that it wasn’t that deep, and that “kids don’t pick up on that stuff.”

Do you think it’s the same with this situation? Do you think we can or cannot subtly teach racism to children by how “bad guys” are presented?