Disney has gone all-in on social-justice grievance politics while boasting about its inclusivity. It’s as if Disney has never met itself.
Training materials leaked from the Walt Disney Corporation cover all the predictable social justice talking points. There’s a “white privilege checklist.” The materials talk about “microaggressions” and “antiracism.” They denounce the United States as a systemically racist country that targets black people, which is the popular lie that buoys the Black Lives Matter movement. The materials also tout a “21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge” and a “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice” how-to guide, as if to drive home how insufferable all of this is.
Some might say, though, that Disney hasn’t managed to slow its own racism. Disney shrunk John Boyega’s Star Wars character for a Chinese promotional poster while removing characters played by Oscar Isaac and Lupita Nyong’o. Boyega and Nyong’o are black; Isaac is Hispanic.
For a company that prizes inclusivity, Disney’s focus on erasing or minimizing people of certain races or ethnic backgrounds to appease China is well-documented. The last bit of the company’s spine was removed in 1999 when Disney made a play to regain access to the Chinese market after the perpetually offended Chinese Communist Party threw a tantrum over the Martin Scorsese film Kundun, which was sympathetic to the Dalai Lama. Disney bribed its way back in by promising a Disney Park in China.
Since then, Disney’s focus on “inclusion” has been limited to anything that would keep it included in the Chinese market. That means minimizing Boyega and erasing other nonwhite actors from promotional posters. It also means whitewashing a Tibetan character in the Marvel film Doctor Strange. And then, of course, Disney brought back the film Mulan, which helped ease tensions with the CCP in 1999, for a live-action remake.
The United States is steeped in systemic racism, according to Disney. But if arms of the Chinese government are actively taking part in the genocide of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang? They get Disney’s thanks for letting it shoot the film in the same region as concentration camps.
By Disney’s lights, police in the U.S. are racists hunting down people over their skin color. But police in Hong Kong, brutally suppressing pro-democracy protesters? They get praised by Mulan’s lead actress with no consequences.
While Disney touts its “long history of inclusivity,” its history of kowtowing to China’s racism and exclusion in pursuit of money is continuing to be written every day. Its social justice facade fades quickly when China comes calling because the company knows its customers, from the apolitical to the race-obsessed progressive culture to whom it is pandering, will let it get away with it every single time.
