I Wanna Be Like King Louie

As a child I loved the movie Jungle Book with all those cool characters like Baloo the Bear and Bagheera the Panther, but my absolute favorite was King Louie, the "King of the Swingers." He is an orangutan who lives deep in the jungle, in the ruins of an old temple, with a bunch of monkeys who all play jazz. There is hardly a cooler cartoon character to be found! King Louie sings a song to Mowgli the man-cub called, "I Want to Be Like You," but I wanted to be like King Louie! Then a college roommate ruined the fun for me when she said King Louie was a racist characterization. She said, "That song is about black people wanting to be like white people." This roommate was, of course, white herself. As a matter of fact, so is Louis Prima, who does the voice of King Louie and is presumably the model for him. What I am wondering is, who is more racist, the white child who watches a cartoon without any notion of race, or the adult white woman who sees racism in the depiction of... what? An Italian-American? If King Louie is a stereotype, would he not then be an Italian stereotype?

This same roommate was once bemoaning the fact that several people in her class were in favor of welfare reform, and when I said, "I am too - I saw a lot of abuse of the system," she immediately accused me of racism. I was shocked, since the cases I had in mind were all white folks. When I said that, she backed down, but I wish I'd had the presence of mind to point out that assuming everyone on welfare is a minority is the truly racist position. She was raised in an upper-middle class family and was sent to a school across town when the one near her became too "problematic" (read: diversified), while I grew up in a 'hood and had actually interacted with people of all sorts of colors and saw how the minorities tended to lift themselves out of poverty while the whites stayed mired in the system.

Another roommate in that same houseful of college girls once turned off a college football game my friend and I were watching. We found this incredibly rude and demanded to know why she had done such a thing, and she replied that she hated Florida State. Her reasoning? Their team name, the Seminoles, was racist. They had been playing Notre Dame, so we asked if Fighting Irish wasn't more offensive than a team name that is simply the name of a tribe, and she said, "Well, the Irish have never been suppressed." We just stared at her in shock, so she must have realized how stupid she sounded and quickly added, "I mean, not in this country." Guess she never heard about all those "No Irish need apply" signs businesses used to put in their windows.

I certainly believe racism is real and widespread; almost everyone has some unreasonable prejudice against another group. What amuses me so much is how so-called "liberals" seem to be the quickest to display assumptions while denying that they possess any prejudice. I once had a boss reprimand me for asking someone if she were so-and-so with a Hispanic last name. She said, "Just because she is dark, you shouldn't make assumptions." I replied that I had been talking to the woman in question for 40 minutes about her "abuelita's" Mexican cooking and then realized we had never been introduced. She kind of backed off, and then I thought... hellooo, who's making ASSUMPTIONS?

I will leave you with a true example of racism. (Why make up issues when so many real ones exist?) When I was in New Orleans, I learned a tiny bit about Voodoo, and some aspects struck me as objectionable (spirit possession, anyone?) but many people there are Catholic while bringing some vestiges of African religions into their Christianity. I don't care if someone depicts St. Peter as an old man with a hat and a cane. Who cares if he looks like Legabe or some other African god? I care more about what points a person towards God and what separates him, not the outward trappings like that. The ironic thing is that the people who holler loudest about synchretism in New Orleans Catholicism are the ones who are most into bizarre rituals that come straight from pre-Christian European religions. (Can you say "May Crowning of Mary"?) Either one can be a help to lift our sights to God or a hindrance by getting in the way of what is essential to faith, and to treat one as pious and the other as devil worship is racism at its worst.