Tom, Jerry and Mammy Two Shoes...?

Children's are exposed to the media growing up and their effects can be more damaging than first let on. Despite how some people will argue today that our culture is too politically correct, shows that are often instrumental to childhoods often have racist imagery or thoughts that are ingrained without double checking into a starting generation. If a show or a work of media is particularly iconic to the extent where it finds relevance with an audience today, its racial effects and ideas are often downplayed in favor of just how "good" the piece of work is. When this happens to a children's show, impressionable children are often given stereotypical, inaccurate caricatures of how marginalized people live and act which impressions their mind and perpetuates a system they were exposed to at a young age.

A great example of this would be Tom and Jerry, a cartoon that some of our parents might have grown up with. In Tom and Jerry, there is a character called Mammy Two Shoes. Mammy Two Shoes wasn't exactly a complex character. There is very little more to her than cooking, or fussing over keeping a house clean. She is often outwitted or tested by the animals, and has trouble controlling Tom and removing Jerry from her home. Her race is a major component of her labor and character. The work she is doing is stereotypical slave work if you were to live in the house as an "aunt". Her race is also the source of sexualized jokes, and sight gags that deny her of womanhood like how her strong, wrathful body can break down a door with her bare hands or how her violent temper can injure and whip a cat down the street. Either way, there is no personality to the character "Mammy Two Shoes" aside from racial stereotypes that, until a 2005 box set with Whoopi Goldberg providing commentary, were not warned for.