Antagonistic Portrayals of Arabs in Aladdin

There were a few instances in class where we brought up Disney and the misrepresentation of racial minorities in film. Ultimately, the construction of racial stereotypes through movies intended for viewers of a young age establishes a misunderstanding of minorities within children early on.

A prime example of misrepresentation in Disney movies other than Pocahontas is Aladdin. Other than the main protagonists Aladdin and Jasmine, the other Arab characters are often portrayed as malicious and threatening. Disney creates these antagonists through the manipulation of characters’ manner of speaking. While Aladdin and Jasmine are depicted with entirely “American” accents, the antagonists are depicted with strong foreign accents. In the movie, these antagonists are featured threatening to cut off Jasmine’s hand among other heinous acts. Subsequently, the more foreign and less assimilated characters in the movie appear, the more malicious they seem. The movie thus instills in children the association between foreignness and threat. In a similar way, all of our readings for this unit explore the usage of film to reconfirm and propagate misrepresentations of minorities.

In Deloria’s chapter “Representation,” he quotes Red Eagle claiming that “the average Indian picture made the Indian out to be a “yelling, painting, bedaubed creature, reeking of barbarism and possessing little or no intelligence,” and cautioned that such films were “instilling an antagonistic germ in the mind of the young American against the American Indian that, if continued, may cause a bitterness” (92). In the same way that Aladdin proliferates notions of antagonism against Arabs, many films from the Deloria reading plant the seed of antagonism against American Indians.

Watch at 5:20.