The New "Progressive" Blackface of Animated Stereotypes!

from Quillette:

At the New Yorker, Harvard professor Namwali Serpell describes Soul as part of a “long tradition of American race-transformation tales” that are “unable to resist making white people the hero of blackness. The white desire to get inside black flesh is absolved as an empathy exercise. Blackface gets a moral makeover. It’s telling that, in most race-transformation tales, the ideal is presented as a white soul in a black body.”  This kind of film theory is preoccupied with the particulars of race, gender, identity, and representation at the expense of universally resonant themes of, say, love and loss or success and failure.  Of course, it is important to be mindful of cultural particulars—and Pixar seems to have made that effort. The studio assembled a “cultural brain trust” to develop the picture once it was agreed that the protagonist would be black. The basic premise, after all, had been the idea of (white) writer/director Pete Docter, whose Inside Out had seen wild critical and commercial success but left him feeling somehow hollow. So (black) co-writer/director Kemp Powers was brought aboard along with a diverse cast: musical luminaries Herbie Hancock, Jon Batiste, and Terri Lyne Carrington; anthropologist Johnnetta Cole; cinematographer Bradford Young; and Dr. Peter Archer, the Queens middle school band teacher and real-life model for Joe. 

However, to identitarians, Docter’s developmental role renders the project fundamentally fraudulent—a “white story” masquerading as a black one. If Docter taints the project, Fey poisons it. A number of reviewers (Serpell included) appear to discount the scene in which Unborn Soul 22 explains that denizens of the Great Before have no sex or race, and quickly assumes a variety of voices and forms, including Joe’s own, by way of illustration. Mischievously, 22 settles on a middle-aged white woman’s voice because “it annoys people.” But Serpell believes she has identified a more sinister agenda on the part of the filmmakers: 

[E]rotic frisson is all over race-transformation films. (Penis size comes up a lot.) In Soul, prurience sneaks in around the shower curtain, the lotion, Twenty-two’s knowing comments about “someone named Lisa” whom she learns about while rummaging in Joe’s mind. The film dutifully desexualizes Joe by putting the figure of a grouchy white woman inside him. Twenty-two’s not there to try out the D; she’s there, as the film says, to walk a mile in his shoes.

Makes you homesick for W.E.B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk" don't it? 

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro... two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”

 ― W.E.B. DuBois, "The Souls of Black Folk"

Meanwhile, in realm on non-animated films...

That Progressive Liberal grand narrative just lives EVERYWHERE, don't it?  ;)