Is it really Walt Disney’s fault?

So far we have read several articles that are fairly critical of Walt Disney for who he was as a person and what he stood for as an influential human being.  Many of them, such as “The Disneyfication of Children’s Culture” by Henry A. Giroux, put the blame on Walt Disney himself for propagating a view of conservative, white America that he likely was in favor of.  I do not think, however, that all of the blame should be put on him, since his views of what is and is not good must have come from somewhere.  It’s not like Walt Disney himself defined beauty or race relations.

The goal of Disney, at the end of the day, was to make money.  He was going to make movies that would sell, and in his prime time, there were very specific gender roles, and race relations were fairly nonexistent.  I believe that Walt Disney made films like Cinderella or Peter Pan because he knew that white, middle and lower class America would consume them, and many would see nothing wrong with the stories being told.  What this does is it puts the blame on those who were consuming these films happily, and those who agreed with the ideologies in the films.  Parents showed their children these films at the time because they likely agreed with the messages being portrayed.

What I am getting at is that there is a much deeper issue that needs to be resolved in America, where sexism, racism, homophobia, and many other issues were and still are seen as common place and even good to some people.  What Walt Disney did was see a market that was not being exploited and create a business that he believed would make money, which is the ideal of basically any capitalist who ever lived.  While some may still blame him, understandably, for engraining these ideals into the nation’s youth, I think authors like Giroux should take a step back and look at the bigger picture, and start to question why Disney thought it was okay to make the films that he did.