Author: Rose Woodhouse

These past few weeks I have had the pleasure of having a philosophical back and forth with someone with whom I went to grad school in philosophy. He is a political philosopher who has no background in disability studies, but (I gather) a burgeoning interest in disability.

For those who don’t know, I have a rather strong personal and professional interest in disability. Much of my freelance work is about disability, and my son, Edmund, has Cri du Chat syndrome.

Former Fellow Grad Student hasn’t quite said outright that we should not accommodate people with disabilities until they are as typically functioning as possible, but has said, more or less: capital isn’t free, some people with disabilities will suck up enormous resources and we can expect very little in the way of economic return for our investment.

From: Investing in People with Disablities – Blinded Trials II

HOWEVER. I am here neither to sing its praises nor bemoan its shortcomings qua entertainment. I am here to write of its morality. It means to be taken very seriously as a message to the audience of the evils institutional racism. Not as self-serious as Crash, but maybe only a few frames shy.

Briefly, in the city of Zootopia, all animals have shed their species’ genetic destiny to become the animal they wish to be. We follow bunny protagonist, Judy Hopps, as she defies expectations that she farm. She becomes the first bunny cop. Both explicitly and implicitly, though, the characters clearly have not shed their beliefs that anatomy is destiny – exhibiting their damaging prejudices against other species and groups of species (e.g., foxes are seen as sly, prey distrust predators).

It’s a much more clever and subtle message movie than Crash, actually. (Not that that’s difficult. And not that any movie, even children’s movies, need be a message movie.) It has a very nuanced understanding of the ways bias keeps an animal down in the world. The species do not, with one glaring exception which will be discussed below, strictly correspond to any one human ethnic group or race. There are, though, moments, experienced by the animals that recall human biases – one animal is complimented for being “articulate.”

From: Zootopia, che cozz? – Blinded Trials II