Last Wednesday, two white actors announced that they would be taking leave from the black animated characters they had been voicing. The first was Jenny Slate, who played the breathy, bright-eyed, and horny Missy Foreman-Greenwald for four seasons of the animated comedy “Big Mouth.” (Season 4 has not yet been released.) In a statement posted on Instagram, Slate explained that although she once thought it “permissible” to play Missy “because her mom is Jewish and White”—as Slate herself is—Missy “is also Black,” and “Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.” Later the same evening, Kristen Bell posted a statement from the team behind “Central Park,” stating that Bell would relinquish her character, Molly Tillerman, another animated daughter of an interracial marriage. It read, “Kristen, along with the entire creative team, recognizes that the casting of the character of Molly is an opportunity to get representation right—to cast a Black or mixed race actress and give Molly a voice that resonates with all of the nuance and experiences of the character as we’ve drawn her.” The announcements continued thusly throughout the week. Mike Henry, a white voice actor on “Family Guy,” tweeted that “persons of color should play characters of color,” ending his twenty-one-year run as the voice of Cleveland, Peter Griffin’s high-talking black friend, who’d inspired his own spinoff show. “The Simpsons,” by now well versed in the subject of impertinent white voices, will, according to a statement released on Friday, “no longer have white actors voice non-white characters.”
American animation, populated by sentient foodstuffs and puttied humanoids, has often been considered exempt from the country’s prejudices—an understandable, if convenient, fantasy of exceeding real life’s doldrums. In fact, it is a genre built on the marble and mud of racial signification. Much like vaudeville and the sitcom, and the American stage and screen writ large, the business of cartoons emerged from the performative tradition of cross-racial desire, also known as minstrelsy. If you’ve ever wondered why our looniest ’toons wear enormous buttons and have outsize gloves for hands, take a look at Zip Coon, the uppity black dandy whose formal attire only served to accentuate the uncouthness of his character. Scholars such as Christopher P. Lehman, the author of “The Colored Cartoon,” and Nicholas Sammond, the author of “Birth of an Industry,” have pointed out that the sartorial inheritance is more than cosmetic: the manners and antics of cartoons were always borrowed from the minstrel’s stage, even as the minstrel himself faded as a staple of mass culture in the twentieth century. In Walt Disney’s first sound film, “Steamboat Willie,” a proto-Minnie Mouse cranks the tail of a guitar-chomping goat, whose gaping mouth reproduces the popular minstrel tune “Turkey and the Straw,” while Mickey shuffles along. But while early cartoons had a penchant for the sights and sounds of black masquerade, along with traditionally black musical forms, the black voice lagged behind. “Because animators struggled to draw the movement of a figure’s mouth accurately, unintelligibly pronounced ‘Negro dialect’ would have been an especially formidable challenge to them,” Lehman writes. Animators would catch up, of course, as the jive-talking murder of Jim Crows in Disney’s “Dumbo,” from 1941, can affirm. But most cartoons had, and still have, a bit of jive-talking to them—a feature, like their general unruliness, yoked to stereotypes of the Negro.