For more than a decade, Cal State San Marcos tenure-track professor Dreama Moon has organized the public universityâs annual âWhiteness Forum,â which showcases student projects aimed at providing students with a âcritical look at whiteness.â
This year, one project targeted the Christian cartoon âVeggie Talesâ as racist because it allegedly perpetuates racial stereotypes.
In an interview, the student claimed that the accents of the evil characters tend to sound ethnic, e.g. Latino, and be vegetables âof color,â while the good characters sound white.
âWhen kids see the good white character triumph over the bad person of color character they are taught that white is right and minorities are the source of evil,â the project stated. âVeggie Talesâ and other like-minded works have made the good messages in the Bible dangerous.
Eric Metaxas, a former âVeggie Talesâ writer and narrator, light-heartedly dismissed the accusation.
“All vegetables are part of one race, even though they are of many colors,” Metaxas said. “They are all descended from the same parents â the Adam and Eve of vegetables, who foolishly ate a forbidden fruit (irony?) and screwed everything up for all vegetables descended from them. At least Iâm pretty sure thatâs the story.”
As PJ Media points out, the villains typically have silly, exaggerated accents, but donât usually discriminate by race. âJosh and the Big Wall,â which tells the story of Joshuaâs capture of Jericho, features villains with French accents.
While claiming a popular Christian vegetable cartoon is racist might top the chart, other student projects made similarly absurd claims about white privilege in society.
One project noted that the NFL is racist because most of the players are black while the majority of the coaches and owners are white. Another project, featuring photos of women in the KKK, argued that white, female Trump supporters advance white supremacy.
The forum, which is the highlight of Professor Moonâs âThe Communication of Whitenessâ course, attracted several hundred students throughout the day, many of which were driven by extra credit opportunities provided by their professors.
Brendan Pringle (@BrendanPringle) is writer from California. He is a National Journalism Center graduate and formerly served as a development officer for Young America’s Foundation at the Reagan Ranch.
