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Q1- Do you believe that we still have media shows (e.g. movies, tv shows, cartoons) that are racist? If so, what are they and how are they racist?

Q2-  Knowing the action that Amazon did in warning its viewers of racism, was it considered a right act or not? And why?

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With time the cartoon changed Mammy's two shoes image to avoid racism. She is now the house owner and is nicely dressed with lots of jewelry and not being inferior. Since before, White Americans were shown as more superior than African Americans. This was obviously considered racist as racism is defined as a racial group that is superior to the other (Liu et al., 2014).

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Tom and Jerry | Saturday Evening Puss - Part 3.

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On January 20, 2009, Obama was sworn in as the 44th President and the first African-American president of the United States, which is a symbol of a turning point in American racism. From 2009 to 2016, the Obama administration established several policies aimed at reducing institutional discrimination against racial/ ethnic minorities in the United States, including policies in health care, college admissions, housing, and fair lending (Bleich et al., 2007). However, preferential policies are only the guarantee of the basic living conditions and fairer opportunities for blacks. The restriction on the widespread racial discrimination is very limited. Blacks are still under tremendous psychological pressure caused by racial prejudice. Having a higher household income and a college degree do not serve as protective factors against experiencing discrimination for black adults in the United States (Bleich et al., 2007). The discrimination African Americans suffer in all areas of social life has not decreased. Subsequently, the withdrawal of these policies by the Trump administration makes the future of racial discrimination in the United States more unpredictable.

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Racial prejudice has existed in American society since the founding of the United States. On the one hand, the early immigrants to the United States came from continental Europe, and with them came white racial superiority. On the other hand, blacks entered the United States as slaves during the development of the American continent. The idea of racial superiority has long been embedded in the white mind. American writer Melville (1892) once called Americans the peculiar and chosen people.

Such racial superiority theory has led to widespread discrimination in various fields in America. Marger (1991) believes that no other country in the world has such severe racial discrimination as the United States. Due to historical reasons, the prejudice of white people against black people has been widely accepted and has become the code of conduct in white society. Ethnic prejudice is public and not obvious (Farley 2004). It exists in every aspect of American social life, especially against African Americans. Therefore, in the specific cultural context, the black character in the hit Tom and Jerry is also portrayed as a housemaid, the common occupation for black women at that time.

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The issue of racism has always seemed inevitable in the American entertainment industry. Early forms of entertainment such as vaudeville in America were rife with racial and gender jokes. In the 20th century, especially after world War II, the issue of race became more and more important. People begin to pay attention to the expression of racial issues in various images in daily media and become sensitive to the entertainment forms that used to be dominant and habitual. Film researchers began to realize that animated films, which had not entered the research field in the past, actually contained quite rich discourse about power, behavior and social control. In post-World War II cartoons, those once cute animals have become the cover and incarnation of violent and racist human characters, even in the modern animation works of Disney and MGM, such a phenomenon is inevitable. Tom and Jerry is a famous animation series created by MGM in 1939. In the 25 years from 1939 to 1954, MGM produced many cartoons of Tom and Jerry. The cartoon series, which features farce, became a worldwide hit, and as the market opened up, Tom and Jerry became household names in China. Since animation has been recognized as one of the native American art forms, it is quite appropriate to take this animation as an example to discuss animation performance and the cultural differences and values behind it.

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Mammy is one of the common descriptions of African Americans in literature, art, and movies in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. It is the prototype of black women who worked as maids or nanny in white households after slavery was abolished (Perkins, 2014). In the cartoon Tom and Jerry, mammy is represented as Mammy Two Shoes and appeared between 1940 and 1952.

Mammy Two Shoes is an overweight black woman who can only be seen below the waist. Another typical feature of Mammy Two Shoes is wearing a pair of slippers and socks with a patch on the heel (Coughlan, 2014).

The last time Mammy Two Shoes appeared in this cartoon was in the episode PushButton Kitty released on September 6, 1952. Mammy Two Shoes was re-edited by MGM Studios in the 1960s-the studio replaced her with a slender white woman and changed her name to Mrs. Two Shoes (Coates, 2014).

Whoopi Goldberg believes that the Tom and Jerry episodes included in this series come from an era when racial and ethnic differences were satirized in the name of entertainment, and these prejudices were wrong and then wrong today (Beniamin Cotan, 2013).

Frank Furedi, a cultural commentator and sociology professor, attacked the warning as "hollow", describing it as a "false piety" and a censorship that "seems to be sweeping through cultural life". He thinks people are looking backwards, judging people in the past based on existing values (Coughlan, 2014).

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Tom and Jerry is a classic animated comedy series released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in February 1940. The series has produced more than 100 episodes, winning seven Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film. It creates Tom and Jerry, the famous screen partners who fight and chase each other forever, yet need each other and cannot be separated. The series has three critical features: short films (ranging from 6-9 minutes), anarchic tendencies and mime performances. It has been introduced to more than 100 countries and has brought great joy to people worldwide.

For decades, Tom and Jerry has been enjoying great popularity among the audience of all ages and remained the main show on televisions. It has moved onto other media in popular culture, providing goods like comic books, comic strips, video games and audiovisual products. In the film and TV industry, a series of derivatives have been created, including short films, feature-length movies, direct-to-video films and a live-action and animated hybrid film. The latest film, a mix of real action and animation released in 2021 was a huge box-office success.

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(Based on Jackson, 2014. p.162)

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Jackson (2014) defines Stereotyping as negatively identifying specific features or characteristics of people from a different culture. She also illustrates a list of the people who could be stereotyped in the media (seen in table 1). In the cartoon, we can notice that the Animation writers racially stereotype characteristics of the African Americans, language, intelligence, appearance, and place in society. These are marked from mammy's two shoes position in the cartoon as she is presented as a white household maid that is poorly clothed with stitched socks and a thick African American Vernacular English (AAVE) rather than Standard English (SAE). Also, from the video above, they present here as an uneducated person by spelling "out" as "O-U-W-T".

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Tom and Jerry, 1 Episode - Puss Gets the Boot (1940) - trimmed

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In 2004，Amazon Prime Instant Video has added Tom and Jerry to its content, along with a warning at the beginning of the credits as a disclaimer about racism. The warning is: "Tom and Jerry shorts may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society. Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today."