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BABAK ELAHI Pride Lands: The Lion King, Proposition 187, and White Resentment For )enny, KaMa, and Roxanne My son, Alexander, is a white male with blue eyes and blond hair. He has never discriminated against anyone in his little life (except possibly young women visitors whom he suspects of being baby-sitters). But public policy now discriminates against him. The sheer size of the so-called 'protected classes' that are now politically favored, such as Hispanics, will be a matter of vital importance for as long as he lives. And their size is basically determined by immigration. Peter Brimelow, Aiien Nation (1995) Peter brimelow's highly sentimental passage about his son's vulnerability to the "protected classes" exemplifies a kind of White resentment that has dominated much of public middle-class discourse in the past decade. Brimelow's comments rely on a personalized image of White patriarchy in his emphasis on his son's white skin, blue eyes, and blond hair. Alexander, this apparently guiltless heir of an Anglo-American tradition, is under threat from an unholy alliance between liberal government and non-White minorities grouped in questionable racial categories—i.e., Hispanics. In the 1990s, this image of the threatened fair heir became a political rallying cry (for Brimelow and others like William Bennett) as well as a popular theme in films such as Braveheart and The Lion King, both of which tell stories of avenging sons. The political rhetoric of Peter Brimelow on immigration has a clear affinity to the racial allegory to be found in such seemingly harmless popular Arizona Quarterly Volume 57, Number 3, Autumn 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 122 Babak Elahi media as the enormously successful The Lion King. Together—along with other public texts—they provide a structure of meaning for many White readers/spectators who, like Brimelow, feel that they have been dispossessed as a result of an "open" immigration policy and a "generous " welfare system. Placed in the context of popular discussions of immigration and race, and in the narrower context of its own "tributary" media, The Lion King's allegory of White resentment becomes clear. Two kinds of popular press can be read alongside The Lion King to show how the ideology of White resentment constitutes a pattern cutting across these cultural areas. The first kind of press related to the film is what, borrowing Paul Smith's term, I will call its "tributary media" (quoted in Willis 7)—popular press surrounding the film. This press highlights the film's coming of age narrative, particularly in the context of the father-son relationship. Stretching Smith's term, I also look at one article in English Journal that recommends the use of The Lion King in high school English courses to teach how archetypes work in Hamlet. In light of this emphasis on the patriarchal mythology and archetypes of the film, the threat of the villains can be read as both sexually and racially "marked" as non-white, non-heterosexual-male. Thus, a reading of these tributary media leads to a discussion of the wider mythology of race and sex in the film. The color-contrasts, mise-en-scene, voice-overs, and narrative of the film clearly suggest that Scar and the hyenas are non-White or, at least in the color-scheme of the film, nonblond . The second kind of popular press that connects with the themes of race and patriarchy in The Lion King are popular editorials on immigration —including, specifically, Peter Brimelow's book-length editorial , Alien Nation—that circulated in the public sphere in the Summer and Fall of 1994. The pattern of White resentment, a pattern that clearly cuts across film, popular press, and other forms of discourse has, in fact, a long history in U.S., White, middle-class discourse. Indeed, the myth of a white patriarchy under attack from an alliance between radical White government and non-White invading hordes goes back to the birth of Hollywood when Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, William Denning's and Woodrow Wilson's historical writing, and D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation provided a structure of feeling similar...

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