Mickey’s Diverse Image: Some Adults See Him in a Different Light

One of my kindergartners runs over to the area where the backpacks are, skids to a halt, dumps his Mickey Mouse backpack, and races off to play. The sight of Louis* makes me smile. He even resembles The Mouse a bit – a huge smile and big eyes with a look of mischievous curiosity very like Mickey Mouse.

Mickey Mouse is 70 years old and is the quintessential symbol of American childhood. Mickey offers 70 years of American memories, and although he hasn’t changed much, what Mickey Mouse represents for different people has.

For Louis’ generation, Mickey Mouse symbolizes the joy of childhood, and Disneyland is the dream destination of many children who want to meet him. Ask people 40 or older what Mickey Mouse means to them and you may get vastly different memories. Mickey Mouse is an ironic cultural marker.

For instance, both my friend Geoffrey and I remember watching the Mickey Mouse Club when we were young. That’s where our memories of Mickey Mouse diverge. While I was visiting Disneyland at age 6, he was wishing he could have. He was longing to be a Mouseketeer even though he knew that there were no children of color in the Mouseketeers Club.

Undeterred, one day he approached his mother and announced with excitement that he wanted to be a Mouseketeer. Geoffrey’s mother was the breadwinner and the mother. She did not have the luxury of long explanations. Either she would relay the painful truth or someone else would under more public circumstances. As Geoffrey put it, “For my mother back then there was no Psychology 101.”

She was blunt. “Little n______ boys can’t be Mouseketeers” she stated flatly. Crushed, he ran out of the room crying.

It’s a tragic story from all sides. How does a mother explain the unexplainable to her child?

Still, Geoffrey finds humor in his pain and transcends it in the telling. He retells the story to a variety of audiences, pantomiming his dramatic response to his mother’s blunt answer while communicating the painful truth of that racist situation.

In a somewhat different position, but from a mother’s perspective, Coretta Scott King tells her own story about the Disney Corporation and her own explanations as a mother. I imagine that Mrs. King has had to answer some tough questions in her lifetime. Different versions of “why?” must have pressed on her heart.

At one point when Martin Luther King, Jr., was in jail, her daughter asked her the difficult question, “Why is Daddy in jail?” In terms a small child could understand, she said,

“Daddy’s in jail so that little girls like you can go to Disneyland.”

“Oh.” Her daughter thought a moment. “It’s OK if Daddy stays in jail.”

She tells the story with a wry smile, transcending the story’s pain with humor. The rest is history.

What I’ve noticed about my friend Geoffrey is that his response to racism is to frequently appropriate the objects of racism. He’s been known to, “expropriate black jockey statues from unsuspecting lawns in and around America’s hinterlands,” and “collect” them. Just as abolitionists used these same statues to mark safe houses for runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad, so Geoffrey twists the object from its original hurtful intent.

Paradoxically, Geoffrey has collections of Mickey Mouse objects – a watch, a telephone, T-shirts – and he gives Mickey Mouse stuff to his daughter as well. It is his humorous, and symbolic, gesture. Mickey Mouse symbolizes the painful discrimination Geoffrey overcame as a child.

Mickey Mouse is an odd reminder of racial discrimination in this country and conversely, an odd marker of racial progress. If childhood joy is the only thing Mickey Mouse represents for Louis and all other children of his generation, then we have nudged toward racial justice in a quiet, poignant way.

* the names of all children have been changed

Posted May 26, 2000